Kantian Dignity and Trolley Problems in the Literature of Richard Wright 3031402162, 9783031402166

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AMERICAN LITERATURE READINGS IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Kantian Dignity and Trolley Problems in the Literature of Richard Wright Michael Wainwright

American Literature Readings in the 21st Century Series Editor

Linda Wagner-Martin University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, NC, USA

American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century publishes works by contemporary authors that help shape critical opinion regarding American literature of the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-­ first centuries. The books treat fiction, poetry, memoir, drama and criticism itself—ranging from William Dow’s Narrating Class in American Fiction and Amy Strong’s Race and Identity in Hemingway’s Fiction, to Maisha L. Wester’s African American Gothic and Guy Davidson’s Queer Commodities: Contemporary U. S. Fiction, Consumer Culture, and Lesbian Subcultures. Beginning in 2004, the series is now well established and continues to welcome new book proposals. Manuscripts run between 80,000 and 90,000 words, while the Pivot format accommodates shorter books of 25,000 to 50,000 words. This series also accepts essay collections; among our bestsellers have been collections on David Foster Wallace, Norman Mailer, Contemporary U.S. Latina/o Literary Criticism, Kurt Vonnegut, Kate Chopin, Carson McCullers, George Saunders, and Arthur Miller (written by members of the Miller Society). All texts are designed to create valuable interactions globally as well as within English-speaking countries. Editorial Board: Professor Derek Maus, SUNY Potsdam, USA Professor Thomas Fahy, Long Island University, USA Professor Deborah E. McDowell, University of Virginia and Director of the Carter G. Woodson Institute, USA Professor Laura Rattray, University of Glasgow, UK

Michael Wainwright

Kantian Dignity and Trolley Problems in the Literature of Richard Wright

Michael Wainwright Department of English Royal Holloway University of London Shepperton, Middlesex, UK

ISSN 2634-579X     ISSN 2634-5803 (electronic) American Literature Readings in the 21st Century ISBN 978-3-031-40215-9    ISBN 978-3-031-40216-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40216-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

For Inge, Virginia, and Wendy ho bios brachys, hê de technê makrê

Acknowledgments

I thank the Richard Wright Estate for the use of his article “I Choose Exile” (1951): Reprinted by permission of John Hawkins and Associates, Inc. Copyright© Richard Wright/1951 Copyright Claimants: Ellen Wright, Julia Wright, Rachel Wright I thank the following for help in obtaining access to “I Choose Exile” (1951): Kathleen Medicus, Special University Libraries

Collections

Cataloger,

Kent

State

Anne Hawkins at John Hawkins and Associates, Inc., New York City A small amount of material in this work has appeared in another publication and I thank those concerned for granting permission to use this material: “Ecological Issues: Rousseau’s ‘A Stag Hunt’ and Faulkner’s ‘A Bear Hunt.’” Mississippi Quarterly 67.2 (Spring 2014; Published Spring 2016): 291–317.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I also extend my gratitude and thanks to the following people for their support, interest, feedback, and patience: Professors Tim Armstrong, Andrew Gibson, and Anne Varty at Royal Holloway, University of London; members of the British Society for Literature and Science for their continuing friendship and advice.

Contents

1 Introduction:  Contesting Equilibria: Martha C. Nussbaum Versus John Rawls  1 2 Kantian Dignity 17 3 Philosophical Literature 51 4 Trolley Problems 83 5 Lifeboats111 6 Richard Wright’s Travails of Mann145 7 Conclusion: Be Reasonable175 Bibliography203 Index221

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List of Figures

Fig. 4.1 Fig. 6.1

Conflicting options of normativity 95 The loop variant to Bystander at the switch151

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Contesting Equilibria: Martha C. Nussbaum Versus John Rawls

SOIT RAISONNABLE, (be reasonable) is their motto. —Richard Wright, “I Choose Exile,” 11; emphasis original

Kantian Dignity and Trolley Problems in the Literature of Richard Wright proffers an interdisciplinary confluence of literature and philosophy that is at once new, significant, and mutually engaging. On the one hand, this offering appeals to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) to provide an authoritative description of dignity, a description that helps to promote trolley problems as an interpretive tool for literary scholars. On the other hand, this offering appeals to the literature of African-American author Richard Wright (1908–60) to defend trolley problems from the criticism that certain philosophers level against them, a defense that helps to promote ethics as a vital hermeneutical concern for literary studies. Starting with the pertinent interventions in the field of literary theory by philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum (b. 1947), drawing on the relatable thoughts of her contemporaries, especially those of philosophers Philippa Foot (1920–2010), John Rawls (1921–2002), Judith Jarvis Thomson (1929–2020), and Derek Parfit (1942–2017), and focusing on an example of hospitable (or readerly) literature in Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children (1938) enable the reciprocal development of each disciplinary stream. The

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Wainwright, Kantian Dignity and Trolley Problems in the Literature of Richard Wright, American Literature Readings in the 21st Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40216-6_1

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combined course targets a mutual understanding that is both provocative and enlightening. “In these challenging times,” writes Barbara Foley in “Richard Wright in the Era of #BlackLivesMatter: Two Views” (2021), “it is all the more important that we bear in mind the mediations enabling Wright to connect ‘black lives’ to ‘all lives’” (352)—and the present study brings this importance to the fore. “Philosophers’ work around philosophy and literature may be roughly divided into two groups,” as Jukka Mikkonen enumerates, “‘philosophy and literature’ and ‘philosophy of literature.’ The former mainly explores the philosophical aspects of literary works (or the literary aspects of philosophical works) and deals with actual works, whereas the latter consists of systematic exploration of theoretical issues related to literature” (296; emphasis original). Nussbaum’s interdisciplinary work on ethical theory and literature usually concerns the first of the former approaches; as a complement, Kantian Dignity and Trolley Problems in the Literature of Richard Wright usually entails this approach too but concentrates on literature and philosophy rather than philosophy and literature. Analytic philosophy, which emerged at the start of the twentieth century, soon dominated the Anglo-American philosophical field, a dominance that pertains to this day. Although the analytic movement distanced itself from the philosophical truths associated with Hegelian idealism, methods rather than doctrines came to define the resulting set of loosely related approaches. As Stephen P. Schwartz emphasizes, “the revolutionary advances in logic, set theory, and the foundations of mathematics in the late nineteenth and very early twentieth centuries” provided the methodological impetus behind analytic philosophy, “the most important of these innovations [being] the development of symbolic logic, which became the indispensable tool and source of ideas” (2). Analytic philosophers examine arguments, issues, and concepts of relevance to the school in question, uncovering their significant features. Insight emerges, as Schwartz explains, “from seeing how things are put together and how they can be prized apart; how they are constructed and how they can be reconstructed” (3). The overall objective is the logical clarification of thought; and analysis of the rational form of philosophical propositions, with the use of symbolic logic and formal grammar, is the method employed to achieve this clarification; as such, analytic philosophy is sometimes termed linguistic philosophy, testifying to the importance of language, its everyday uses and grammatical possibilities, to the various approaches within the movement.

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During the first half of the twentieth century, while analytic philosophy displayed skepticism toward both normative ethics and systemic philosophical explanations, Utilitarianism remained the only popular form of non-skeptical ethics. Yet, while wary of normativity, analytic philosophers did not embrace the emergence of postmodernism: “as a cultural phenomenon analytic philosophy was an expression of modernism in philosophy” (Schwarz 4); its practitioners rejected the collapse of grand narratives into micronarratives, the local incommensurability of language games, and the willful indeterminacies so often associated with the postmodern. Analytic skepticism recognized the postatomic age but rejected nihilism; in doing so, the movement renewed a broad interest in ethics. Leading figures in the various fields of analytic philosophy include G.  E. M.  Anscombe, John Austin, Stanley Cavell, Roderick Chisholm, Donald Davidson, Cora Diamond, Michael Dummett, Philippa Foot, R.  M. Hare, Eileen John, Saul A.  Kripke, Thomas Kuhn, David Lewis, G.  E. Moore, Thomas Nagel, Otto Neurath, Robert Nozick, Martha C. Nussbaum, Derek Parfit, Karl Popper, Hilary Putnam, W. V. Quine, John Rawls, Hans Reichenbach, Richard Rorty, Bertrand Russell, Moritz Schlick, John Searle, Peter Singer, Alfred North Whitehead, Bernard Williams, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.1 Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy” (1958) helped to revive virtue ethics, restoring interest in Aristotle’s approach to morality; in turn, Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971) helped to revive ethical philosophy, restoring interest in Kant’s contribution to this field. Hence, while analytic philosophy remains the dominant Anglo-American philosophical movement, “since the middle of the eighteenth century,” as Rawls asserts in his Foreword (1982) to Henry Sidgwick’s (1838–1900) The Methods of Ethics (1874), “the dominant systematic moral doctrine in the English-speaking tradition of moral philosophy has been some form of utilitarianism” (v). Certain analytic philosophers, including Nussbaum and Parfit, alongside other philosophical practitioners, including William James (1842–1910) (a pragmatist and psychologist), Charles Sanders Peirce (another pragmatist), and Bryan Magee (a transcendental idealist), often illustrate their theories with examples drawn from literature.2 Certain analytic philosophers, including Dummett, Kripke, and Russell, regularly examine fictional entities such as specific characters. Certain analytic philosophers, including Diamond, Foot, and Parfit, frequently illuminate ethical problems with imagined scenarios. While the present study partakes of, and contributes to, each of these analytic approaches, especially

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the literary illustration of philosophical theories, none of these approaches falls exclusively within either philosophy and literature or the philosophy of literature, and some related focal points are set aside: foremost among these other specializations being the philosophy of criticism and the philosophy of empirical art criticism.3 “An influential call for moral and ethical uses of literature,” as Liesbeth Korthals Altes and Hanna Meretoja stress, “has come from Martha Nussbaum” (606). She accepts literature as an important ethical vehicle. For Nussbaum, as Andrew Gibson relates, poetry and above all fiction “best express contradictions between significant values or systems of value.” These literary forms “also best capture the ethical importance of contingency and the passions, and admit the priority of the particular over the general” (8), and despite continued indifference from scholars of literature, the condemnation of literary theory that closes Nussbaum’s summation from “Perceptive Equilibrium: Literary Theory and Ethical Theory” (1987) remains relevant to their academic discipline: All around us other intellectual disciplines are shaping the private and public life of our culture, telling us how to imagine or think about ourselves. Economic theory forges conceptions of human rationality that govern public policy decisions, decisions about the distribution of food, about social well-being. Legal theorists and jurists search for understanding of basic rights (for example, the right to privacy) and the role that they play in our lives with one another. Psychology and anthropology describe our emotional lives, our experience of gender, our forms of communal interaction. Moral philosophy attempts to arbitrate disputes concerning medical care, abortion, basic freedoms. Literary theory has been too silent too long in these debates. (263)

Despite republishing this hermeneutical intervention as a chapter of Love’s Knowledge (1990)—a wide-ranging collection of self-penned articles, which the subtitle of the book describes as Essays on Philosophy and Literature—few literary theorists have paid attention to Nussbaum’s forthright engagement with their discipline.4 As Nussbaum avers in “Perceptive Equilibrium,” she envisages “a literary theory that works in conversation with ethical theory” (261), but while much research into literature persists in assuming an author’s moral compass, with attendant analysis following a biographical route, the remaining hermeneutical trajectories, including historical materialism, anthropology, mythology, and

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psychology, persist in touching on moral issues without tackling ethical concerns as their primary objective.5 The most prominent exception among literary academics to both ethical indifference and tangential involvement is Terry Eagleton.6 In an interview with José Manuel Barbeito Varela from 2001, Eagleton seemingly endorses Nussbaum’s forays into the literary domain. “The truths of art must be brought into dialogical contact with the insights of ethics, science, politics etc.,” avers Eagleton. “Ethical philosophy has a great deal to learn from literature, as an American critic like Martha Nussbaum appreciates” (171). This closing sentence reveals, however, Eagleton’s monologic interpretation of Nussbaum’s concerns, his misunderstanding masquerading for the dialogically informed relations that she envisages. In short, Eagleton’s Marxist hermeneutic emphasizes how literature expresses material reality, an interpretive approach that assumes that the manner and the economics of labor have moral implications, while failing to draw on ethical theory to inform not only those expressions but also that critical assumption. Two decades have passed since Eagleton’s remarks on Nussbaum’s observations, but the pertinence of her judgment continues to carry especial weight because of its dialogical imperative, an imperative that Eagleton tacitly denies, an imperative that demands hermeneutical enlightenment through disciplinary exchange. In offering the first concerted response to that demand, Kantian Dignity and Trolley Problems in the Literature of Richard Wright turns to the basic principles established by Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas to provide a helpful embarkation point that alights on the common ground shared by ethics and the arts. That “to which Aristotle gave the name arete ̄ or Aquinas virtus,” as Foot notes in “Virtues and Vices” (1977), actually designates a conceptual overlap, referring not to the moral virtues alone but “to arts, and even to excellences of the speculative intellect whose domain is theory rather than practice” (2).7 This wide-ranging designation countermands a philosophical tendency, one that Nussbaum overlooks in “Perceptive Equilibrium,” but one that Foot explains and helps to readdress in “Virtues and Vices,” one that in part excuses the ethical laxity of literary theorists: “the subject of the virtues and vices was strangely neglected by moralists working within the school of analytic philosophy” (1). That neglect had gestated for more than two hundred years. There was simple and silent agreement that the fundamental work of ethics need not address the subject. “Since this opinion was apparently shared by philosophers such as Kant, Mill, G. E. Moore,

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W. D. Ross, and H. A. Prichard, from whom contemporary moral philosophy has mostly been derived, perhaps the neglect was not so surprising after all” (1), especially when one recalls Aristotle’s disciplinary concession that the virtues and vices are matters of inherent difficulty.8 The confluence of literature and ethics offers a means of tackling this challenging legacy in a manner that usefully informs each discipline. On the one hand, literature often profoundly concerns aspects of human existence, including specific feelings, basic rights, interpersonal politics, and welfare states. Without considering the elements it shares with ethical theory, however, literary theory has what Nussbaum calls “an impoverished future” (“PE” 241). On the other hand, as Nussbaum willingly accepts, literature can “show us what moral philosophy has lost through the absence of dialogue with literary thought” (“PE” 245). In establishing such a dialogue, Nussbaum’s use of the term “moral philosophy,” which covers “many different types of ethical investigations,” enables an “investigation that is not systematic and theoretical” to lie within her philosophical ambit. This broad understanding allows Nussbaum to include “certain works of literature [as] part of moral philosophy” (“PE” 265n2), with the commonality shared between ethics and the arts resting on “a commitment to the ethical relevance of particularity and to the epistemological value of feeling” (“PE” 247).9 Undoubtedly, as philosopher Tommie Shelby remarks in “The Ethics of Uncle Tom’s Children” (2012), “there are many perils involved in using literary fiction for ethical reflection.” These dangers include “conflating imaginary people with real people, treating the fictional work as evidence for moral claims, believing naively that reading fiction will make you a better person, or falsely presuming a close reading of a compelling character can tell us how we should live” (515). Nonetheless, as Bernard Williams observes in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985), “morality is not an invention of philosophers”; rather, “it is the outlook, or, incoherently, part of the outlook, of almost all of us” (174). From the first-personal perspective, “what I am obliged to do is what I must do.” From the third-personal perspective, “moral obligation applies to people even if they do not want it to” (178; emphasis original). This “critical view of morality,” as Eileen John concludes in “Literature and the Idea of Morality” (2010), is “inescapable” (295). Literature “gravitate[s] toward moral concerns” (287). This irresistible attraction “does not mean that the moral project has to be given priority within the work, but […] it has a kind of implacable presence” (293). Nussbaum, in

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effect, concurs. “If our moral lives are ‘stories’ in which mystery and risk play a central and a valuable role,” she argues in “Flawed Crystals: James’s The Golden Bowl and Literature as Moral Philosophy” (1983), one of her formative dialogues between philosophy and literature, “then it may well seem that the ‘intelligent report’ of those lives requires the abilities and techniques of the teller of stories” (142).10 As the title of Nussbaum’s paper suggests, the novels of Henry James (1843–1916), brother of pragmatist and psychologist William, tender such intelligence to her. The novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch also aimed to produce many such reports. “It is important to remember that language itself is a moral medium, almost all uses of language convey value,” she counsels in “Literature and Philosophy” (1997). “This is one reason why we are almost always morally active. Life is soaked in the moral, literature is soaked in the moral” (27). Indeed, literary critic Wayne C. Booth posits that literature does not merely inform ethical education; rather, “stories are our major moral teachers” (20). For Murdoch, the novel “is particularly bound to make moral judgements in so far as [its] subject-matter is the behaviour of human beings” (27). Put succinctly, the presence of morality within the novel is pervasive, and while “there is nothing outside of the text,” as Jacques Derrida insists in Of Grammatology (1974) concerning the “critical production” of hermeneutics (158; emphasis original), “from the perspective of morality,” as Bernard Williams asserts, “there is nowhere outside the system, or at least nowhere for a responsible agent.” As such, and “taking Kant’s term,” as Williams does, “moral obligation is categorical” (178; emphasis original). In accepting the general premise of reciprocally informative relations between moral philosophy and imaginative literature, Nussbaum proffers an ethical perspective on this categorical obligation, one that she hopes will be hospitable not only to those relations, but also to gauging agential responsibility.11 She asks, “how should one live?” (“PE” 245), an initial question that “gestures toward the limits of ethical consciousness, making us aware of the deep elements in our ethical life that in their violence or intensity lead us outside of the ethical attitude altogether, outside of the quest for balanced vision and perfect rightness” (“PE” 261). The way literature responds to this initial demand can help to indicate and then to address the silences into which the complementary prose of philosophy can sometimes lapse. Hence, with its concern for the ethical relevance of particularity, Nussbaum’s moral philosophy, which coincides with Murdoch’s broad

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philosophical and literary quests, somewhat distances itself from those of both Kantians and Utilitarians, each of which operates, as Nussbaum herself observes, “in a ‘pure’ or detached manner, asking what the truth about ethical value might be.” While Kantians “assume that there is a sphere of ‘moral’ values that can be separated off from all the other practical values that figure in a human life,” an assumption that supports Foot’s claim that Kantian fundamentals neglect the subject of the virtues and vices, Utilitarians “assume […] that the value of all choices and actions is to be assessed in terms of a certain sort of consequence that they tend to promote” (“PE” 245).12 Within their overlapping spheres, Kantianism and Utilitarianism are often complementary, with the strengths of one school balancing the weaknesses of the other; so, whether concerning the particularity of agents, groups of agents, or nation states, each school encompasses and subsumes the ethical relevance of that particularity. Of twentieth-century Kantian philosophers, Rawls is of particular interest to Nussbaum; especially his conclusive aim for deliberative morality, an objective he derives from Aristotle, but one that he adapts for his own account of justice. The desired end to this adaptation, which Rawls defines in A Theory of Justice, is the “reflective equilibrium” (20) that results from “the process of mutual adjustment of principles and considered judgments” (20n7).13 Rawls admits that his “approach may not seem to tally with tradition”; he “believe[s], though, that it does.” The “sense that Aristotle gives to justice, and from which the most familiar formulations derive, is that of refraining from pleonexia, that is, from gaining some advantage for oneself by seizing what belongs to another, his property, his reward, his office, and the like, or by denying a person that which is due to him, the fulfillment of a promise, the repayment of a debt, the showing of proper respect, and so on” (TJ 10). While “this definition is framed to apply to actions, and persons are thought to be just insofar as they have, as one of the permanent elements of their character, a steady and effective desire to act justly,” as Rawls maintains, “Aristotle’s definition clearly presupposes […] an account of what properly belongs to a person and of what is due to him” (TJ 10). One means of testing this description is to “note whether applying [its] principles would lead us to make the same judgments about the basic structure of society which we now make intuitively and in which we have the greatest confidence; or whether, in cases where our present judgments are in doubt and given with hesitation, these principles offer a resolution which we can affirm on reflection” (TJ 19).

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Certain moral questions elicit assured answers. “For example,” submits Rawls, “we are confident that religious intolerance and racial discrimination are unjust. We think that we have examined these things with care and have reached what we believe is an impartial judgment not likely to be distorted by an excessive attention to our own interests. These convictions are provisional fixed points which we presume any conception of justice must fit” (TJ 19–20). A related case involves the correct distribution of authority. “Here we may be looking for a way to remove our doubts,” suggests Rawls. “We can check an interpretation of the initial situation, then, by the capacity of its principles to accommodate our firmest convictions and to provide guidance where guidance is needed.” This approach tackles the problem from both ends. “We begin by describing it so that it represents generally shared and preferably weak conditions. We then see if these conditions are strong enough to yield a significant set of principles. If not, we look for further premises equally reasonable. But if so, and these principles match our considered convictions of justice, then so far well and good” (TJ 20). In less assured cases, discrepancies produce choices: We can either modify the account of the initial situation or we can revise our existing judgments, for even the judgments we take provisionally as fixed points are liable to revision. By going back and forth, sometimes altering the conditions of the contractual circumstances, at others withdrawing our judgments and conforming them to principle, I assume that eventually we shall find a description of the initial situation that both expresses reasonable conditions and yields principles which match our considered judgments duly pruned and adjusted. This state of affairs I refer to as reflective equilibrium. It is an equilibrium because at last our principles and judgments coincide; and it is reflective since we know to what principles our judgments conform and the premises of their derivation. (TJ 20)

As Nussbaum remarks, reflective equilibrium is “the condition at which we arrive when we have gone through the procedure” of moral inquiry; “the name suggests balance, an absence of inconsistency or tension, and the dominance of intellectual judgment.” Rawls’s accompanying account of considered judgment, adds Nussbaum, “tells us which judgments to trust and mistrust during the procedure,” with Rawls “assum[ing] from the start that we are using only standing judgments of varying degrees of concreteness, and not,” as Nussbaum prefers, “immersed situational

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perceptions” (“PE” 246). Finally, as Nussbaum notes, Rawls “adds five constraints that must be met by any ethical theory that will even be seriously considered during the procedure of scrutiny. These conditions are that its principles should be general in form and universal in application; that they should be public and available to all; that they should impose a general ordering on conflicting claims; and that these principles should be regarded as final and conclusive” (“PE” 246–47; emphasis original). “Should we,” wonders Nussbaum, “aim at a condition of balance or equilibrium?” (“PE” 247). Her answer is yes. “Should this equilibrium indeed be ‘reflective’—that is, presumably (as Rawls uses the word), a condition that is detached from powerful feeling and from particular situational immersion?” Her answer is no. Nussbaum, who distances herself from both Kantianism and Utilitarianism, rejects a disinterested viewpoint. Arguing otherwise, Nussbaum insists that most people do not inquire into ethical truths “as if they were asking for a description of some separately existing Platonic reality” (“PE” 245). Plato notably “repudiated emotion and appetite as corrupting influences,” she explains in “The Discernment of Perception: An Aristotelian Conception of Private and Public Rationality” (1985), “insisting that correct practical judgments are reached only by encouraging the intellect to go off ‘itself by itself,’ free from their influence as far as possible” (76). Whereas Rawls appears to follow Plato rather than Aristotle, Nussbaum appears to follow Aristotle rather than Plato. Nussbaum insists that people tend to react more readily, less reflectively, more intuitively (even, at times, instinctively), and more emotionally to moral quandaries than Rawls believes. Should we accept Rawls’s conception of ethics as “a set of principles, general in form and universal in application, that is to be publicly recognized as a final court of appeal for ordering the conflicting claims of moral persons” (TJ 135), a system of principles that Nussbaum emphasizes as “determining standards all in advance of life itself” (“PE” 247)? Her answer is emphatically no. Alternatively, should we agree “with Aristotle,” as Nussbaum does in turning Rawls’s first principles against his conception of ethics, “that ‘the discrimination lies in perception?’” (“PE” 247). As Aristotle himself concludes, after a long disquisition in Nicomachean Ethics (350 BC) on the intellectual and moral attributes of virtue, “enough has now been said to show that moral virtue is a mean, and in what sense this is so, namely that it is a mean between two vices, one of excess and the other of defect;

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and that it is such a mean because it aims at hitting the middle point in feelings and in actions” (1109a.1). “To hit the mean,” however, “is a difficult thing to do,” as Aristotle concedes, “and especially in particular cases.” For instance, “it is not easy to define in what manner and with what people and on what sort of grounds and how long one ought to be angry” (1109b.7). Indeed, We sometimes praise men who err on the side of defect in this matter and call them gentle, sometimes those who are quick to anger and style them manly. However, we do not blame one who diverges a little from the right course, whether on the side of the too much or of the too little, but one who diverges more widely, for his error is noticed. Yet to what degree and how seriously a man must err to be blamed is not easy to define on principle. For in fact no object of perception is easy to define; and such questions of degree depend on particular circumstances, and the decision lies with perception. (1109b.7–9)

Nussbaum appreciates Aristotle’s argument: his approach does not preclude objectivity in ethical inquiry; “not […] all choices of method are subjective”; but the “procedures themselves are value-laden” (“PE” 258; emphasis added). Achieved by an agential process “that is always ready to reconstitute itself in response to the new,” Nussbaum calls this subjective alternative to Rawls’s reflective aim “perceptive equilibrium” (“PE” 254).14 This procedure does not depend on the weighing of moral choices against philosophical standards and rules, but relies on perception rather than on reflection to balance orthodox morality, on the one hand, and moral intuitions, on the other. Whereas sustained cerebration alone defines Rawls’s concept, Nussbaum’s concept favors immediate feelings before and above cerebral reflection. Michael Wainwright, Shepperton, 2022

Notes 1. Wittgenstein serves to characterize the difficulties of pinpointing to which branch of analytic philosophy a practitioner belongs. “Wittgenstein’s use of truth-tables in logic and mathematics” in his Tractatus (1922) “provided the fuel for the logical positivist locomotive” (Schwartz 53), but that locomotive eventually encountered steep terrain. “Following the contributions of the late logical positivists, postpositivism emerged as a critique of logical positivism,” as David Baronov relates. “This critique resulted in two

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t­endencies—critical pessimism and critical optimism.” Wittgenstein was crucial to this bifurcation, with his Philosophical Investigations (1953) providing what Baronov calls “the impetus for the development of both the critical pessimists and the critical optimists” (66). 2. “Charles Sanders Peirce had a fascination with [Edgar Allen] Poe’s work stretching all the way back to high school,” as Andrew C.  Jones and Nathan Crick document, “when he performed a dramatic reading of ‘The Raven.’ Explicit reference to Poe’s detective fiction appears, in fact, in his 1908 essay ‘The Neglected Argument for the Reality of God.’ Peirce refers to Poe’s tales of ratiocination here to defend the scientific principle that human reason possesses the capability to comprehend causes that at first seem impossible” (122). In Magee’s wide-ranging discussions of literature and philosophy with novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch, they have occasion to mention, and often discuss, William Shakespeare, Laurence Sterne, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and many others. “Parfit’s lectures in his earlier career are remembered,” as Helen Small notes, “for their detailed use of literary examples: Marcel Proust was favorite ground” (51). 3. “The early analytic aestheticians of the 1950s conceived their discipline as ‘metacriticism’ or the philosophy of criticism,” explains Mikkonen. “Their aim was to discover the fundamental concepts and general principles of art criticism by looking carefully at the work of professional critics. This conception of the discipline was clearly manifested in Monroe C. Beardsley’s work Aesthetics (1958), which was subtitled ‘Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism.’” More recently, “many analytic philosophers of art think that the scope of aesthetics is much broader than the analysis of concepts.” In fact, “some think that descriptive or normative metacriticism is not even possible any more, for criticism has become so diverse an object that a coherent view of its methods cannot be given” (296). Concerning the philosophy of empirical art criticism, “a growing number of aestheticians have taken an interest [in] the findings of the sciences of the mind” (297). These practitioners argue that neuroscience and cognitive science can inform aesthetics—both creatively and receptively—and believe that philosophy can formulate theoretical models to strengthen the empirical analysis of art. In terms of what Mikkonen calls the cognitivist “claim that literary works may communicate [to] their readers propositional knowledge (knowledge-­that) and/or non-propositional knowledge (knowledge-how or knowledge-­what-­it-is-like),” the present study embraces both the propositional and the nonpropositional. Under the first heading, literature provides thought experiments. Under the second heading, literature apprehends not only known situations, known people, known feelings, and

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known reactions, but also unknown (or other) situations, unknown (or other) people, unknown (or other) feelings, and unknown (or other) reactions. Literary works that combine these sorts of knowns and unknowns “allow us to explore moral positions,” as Mikkonen observes, “and many philosophers have seen special value in this,” with Mikkonen citing Nussbaum in particular. Recognizing the literary combination of the propositional and the nonpropositional “is important,” as Mikkonen concludes, “in exploring the intrinsic and instrumental values of literature: are the ethical insights of an artwork part of its literary value? On the other hand, do ethical ‘flaws’ like an evidently racistic representation lessen the aesthetic value of an artwork?” (308; emphasis original). Kantian Dignity and Trolley Problems in the Literature of Richard Wright contributes to these important explorations. 4. In contrast, numerous philosophers, headed by Richard Wollheim (1983), Hilary Putnam (1983), Cora Diamond (1985, 1993), and Tzachi Zamir (2012), have commented on Nussbaum’s literary interventions; and in “Literature and Ethical Theory: Allies or Adversaries?” (2000), Nussbaum herself writes of a noticeable change in philosophical circles. It would be totally commonplace to find discussions of the literary aspects of historical philosophers on the program of an APA meeting, and even more commonplace to find discussions of love, anger, moral perception, and other themes that reflection about fiction might well enhance. Explicit discussion of literary authors as diverse as Sophocles and Coetzee, Wordsworth and Dostoyevsky, Henry James and Knut Hamsun, might easily be found on the program of any mainstream meeting in the area of philosophical ethics. And at least many of the leading moral philosophers would be willing to state that such works make a valuable contribution to philosophical understanding. (9) 5. “Perceptive Equilibrium: Literary Theory and Ethical Theory” is cited parenthetically hereafter as “PE.” 6. Another exception is P.  J. M.  Bond, whose “A Modernist Moral Equilibrium: The Ethics and Literature of the American Expatriates in 1920s Paris” (2018), a master’s thesis “that is inspired by” Nussbaum’s interdisciplinary approach, offers a self-avowed “balancing act between man’s moral sensitivity and man’s modern condition” (10). Bond’s thesis is helpful in reiterating the philosophical responses to Nussbaum’s thoughts concerning the intersections between literary theory and ethical theory. 7. “Virtues and Vices” is cited parenthetically hereafter as “VV.” 8. Thanks to René Descartes and Kant, as Paget Henry notes, “European self-­reflection was directed at the knowing activities of the cogito, self-

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reflection came to know itself as epistemology, rather than phenomenology” (151). 9. Writing of lyric poetry, Mathew Abbott effectively agrees with Nussbaum: “We need to take seriously something that modern philosophy has ­consistently precluded, as it has in thinkers as apparently diverse as René Descartes, David Hume, and Kant: that feeling might participate irreducibly in cognition” (231). 10. Diamond and Zamir broadly approve of Nussbaum’s appeals to literature. Commenting in “Missing the Adventure: Reply to Martha Nussbaum” (1985) on Nussbaum’s “Moral Attention and the Moral Task of Literature” (1985), Diamond applauds both the concern “throughout with the analogy stressed by Henry James between the moral imagination and the creative imagination” and how that “analogy is tied to a conception of moral life in which improvisation and adventure have a significant role” (530). Eight years later, in “Martha Nussbaum and the Need for Novels” (1993), Diamond praises “Nussbaum’s characterisation of ethical inquiry,” which “points us away from the idea that moral thought or ‘moral discourse’ could be circumscribed in philosophy (even roughly) by some general specification of its essential features” (55). “Reflection through literature,” avers Zamir in Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama (2012) in citing Nussbaum, “presents an alternative to the false rigor of analytical philosophy without adopting the deadening skepticism that underlies so much postmodern thought” (44). Wollheim and Putnam show less enthusiasm toward Nussbaum’s efforts than Diamond and Zamir do. “I don’t think that it can really be Professor Nussbaum’s thesis that a work, say like The Golden Bowl, just is a text of moral philosophy,” writes Wollheim. “Even the truths of moral philosophy that she has in mind—and she may be right in thinking that the greater number of truths of moral philosophy are like this—follow from the text of The Golden Bowl in conjunction with some commentary like the one that she provides” (189; emphasis original). Putnam concurs with Wollheim. “The disagreement between Martha Nussbaum and myself, if it is disagreement,” states Putnam, “suggests that Wollheim is probably right: the work of fiction must not be confused with the ‘commentary,’ and it is the commentary that is (or can be) a work of moral philosophy” (199; emphasis original). The present volume compromises between Nussbaum, on the one hand, and Wollheim and Putnam, on the other hand: a philosophical commentary teases out the ethical implications of literary works, textually inflected inferences that feed back into the ongoing engagement with moral philosophy. 11. In “Martha Nussbaum and the Need for Novels,” Diamond agrees with Nussbaum that novels “engaged in the shaping of the language of particu-

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larity” (153) can inform philosophy, providing insights that “ordinary philosophical language” (152) precludes. “Qualitatively oriented explanations” of “the literary reading experience,” as Zamir remarks, “all relate to types of belief formation, to the unique ways in which literature creates beliefs, not to the assessment of those beliefs (whether or not these are the beliefs one ought to have). One can combine the formation and assessment of beliefs. Nussbaum attempts to do so. Indeed, she asserts that some beliefs are refractory to assessment unless one employs the emotional, empathic, or imaginative processes that enabled their original formation.” In fine, concludes Zamir, “Nussbaum’s integration of formation and assessment is sound” (7). 12. Parfit’s definition of such consequentialism appears in Reasons and Persons (1984). The three central claims of Consequentialism (C) are “(C1) There is one ultimate moral aim: that outcomes be as good as possible. C applies to everything. Applied to acts, C claims both (C2) What each of us ought to do is whatever would make the outcome best, and (C3) If someone does what he believes will make the outcome worse, he is acting wrongly” (24). For “risky cases,” Consequentialism further claims: “(C4) What we ought subjectively to do is the act whose outcome has the greatest expected goodness” (25; emphasis original); “(C5) The best possible motives are those of which it is true that, if we have them, the outcome will be best.” For all claims, the term “possible” stands for “causally possible.” When applying C, one must ask not only whether an outcome is for better or worse but also about the size of any resulting alteration. “The simplest answer [to this double demand] is given by Utilitarianism. This theory combines C with the following claim: the best outcome is the one that gives to people the greatest net sum of benefits minus burdens” (26). Parfit outlines the three main versions of Utilitarianism. “What would be best for someone,” according to the Hedonistic Theory, “is what would give him most happiness.” Variants “of this theory make different claims about what happiness involves” and about how to measure contentment. “What would be best for someone,” according to the Desire-Fulfilment Theory, “is what would best fulfil his desires throughout his life.” Different self-contained versions of this theory also exist. “Certain things are good or bad for us,” according to the Objective List Theory, “even if we would not want to have the good things or avoid the bad things.” This theory has its self-contained variants too. “On all these theories, happiness and pleasure are at least part of what makes our lives go better for us, and misery and pain are at least part of what makes our lives go worse. These claims would be made by any plausible Objective List Theory. And they are implied by all versions of the Desire-Fulfilment Theory. On all theories, the Hedonistic Theory is at least part of the truth” (4). Crucially, discussions

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about rationality and the morality of self-interest need not decide between the three main versions of Utilitarianism. 13. A Theory of Justice is cited parenthetically hereafter as TJ. 14. Notwithstanding the interdisciplinary achievement described in the fourth endnote above, Nussbaum’s specific concept of perceptive ­equilibrium, which is integral to the present inquiry, has elicited little direct comment from philosophers.

CHAPTER 2

Kantian Dignity

Even today there are millions of American Negroes whose only sense of a whole universe, whose only relation to society and man, and whose only guide to personal dignity comes through the archaic morphology of Christian salvation. —Richard Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Writing: Two Definitions,” 99

In comparing reflective equilibrium and perceptive equilibrium, Martha C. Nussbaum draws on Henry James’s The Ambassadors (1903) with the aim of illustrating a reciprocally beneficial dialogue between moral philosophy and literary thought. According to “Form and Content, Philosophy and Literature,” Nussbaum’s “Introduction” to Love’s Knowledge, Kantians and Utilitarians would disregard any such dialogue, their respective philosophical perspectives being “hostile to literature” (13).1 Nussbaum does not expound on her reason for choosing The Ambassadors, but the novel presumably provides her with an appropriate and approachable textual vehicle to counter such indifference, at least in part, because of the intellectual relays that pertained between the adult James brothers, the pragmatist and psychologist William and the novelist

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Wainwright, Kantian Dignity and Trolley Problems in the Literature of Richard Wright, American Literature Readings in the 21st Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40216-6_2

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Henry, on the one hand, and between the James brothers and their father, the theologian Henry, on the other. F. O. Matthiessen’s seminal The James Family (1947) emphasizes the rich intellectual reciprocity between the Jameses. “The James family—that is to say, Henry James, Sr., his wife Mary Walsh, and their five children, notably William, Henry, Jr., and Alice—constitute one of the most vivid and varied groups that our American nineteenth century produced.” Matthiessen continues: Henry Senior, true to his time and place, possessed radical ideas on most subjects, including education. He was in a position to put his educational theory into practice, to embrace the opportunities of Europe as well as of America; and his two oldest sons especially are fascinating examples of how any educational theory, depending upon the temperaments it has to deal with, can yield extraordinarily opposite results. Active and passive, participating and detached, scientific and aesthetic, William James and Henry James, Junior, […] divided and ranged in so many contrasting directions that, between them, they touched upon nearly all the major cultural interests of their age. Indeed, after surveying their father’s ideas and his children’s reactions to them, after listening to the family’s discussions of religion and philosophy and literature and politics and society, we may feel that we have gained a fairly full index to American intellectual history from the time of Emerson to that of the first World War. (v)

“The cultural and intellectual centers of New York and then Newport, Rhode Island, along with the sights and spectacles of Europe,” as Jane F.  Thrailkill adds, “provided the perceptual playground” (14) for what Henry, Jr., describes in A Small Boy and Others (1913) as the siblings’ “opening minds” (59). Yet, even while in America, as Henry’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881) adumbrates, Europe provided a cultural landscape for the shaping of Jamesian reflection. In this novel, Mrs. Touchett initially encounters her niece Isabel Archer in a curious room at the family home in Albany, New York State: “a mysterious apartment which lay beyond the library, and which was called, traditionally, no one knew why, the office” (1:27). Isabel is reading a historiographical account of German philosophy. “This small but significant detail,” as Andrew Taylor notes, “locates Isabel in a deliberately specific Romanticist context.” In turn, that context evokes the figure of Ralph Waldo Emerson: “The influence of German philosophy on

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Emerson and his own notion of transcendental thought,” as Taylor adduces, “has been well documented” (127). Emerson’s philosophical initiation into transcendentalism also owed much to Frederic Henry Hedge (1805–90), a Unitarian minister from Cambridge, Massachusetts. Hedge’s philosophical scholarship assimilated Immanuel Kant’s enlightenment as an alternative to John Locke’s empiricism.2 “In all science,” avers Hedge in “Coleridge’s Literary Character” (1833), “there are these two elements or poles, subject and object, or nature and intelligence; and corresponding to these two poles there are two fundamental sciences, the one beginning with nature and proceeding upward to intelligence, the other beginning with intelligence and ending in nature. The first is natural philosophy, the second transcendental philosophy” (92). While Locke subscribed to the axiom that everything in the intellect derives from the senses, senses including reflection, “the disciples of Kant wrote for minds of quite another stamp” (88), subscribing to the axiom that everything derives from the intellect. Hedge championed Kant’s perspective. To Kant, “the father of the critical philosophy,” as Hedge relates, “we are indebted for the successful cultivation of the preparatory, or, to use his own expression, the ‘propaideutic’ branches of the science” (91), a “philosophy, the very essence of which consists in proposing an absolute self as unconditionally existing, incapable of being determined by any thing higher than itself, but determining all things through itself” (92). The impress of this absolute self is reason. “If now it be asked, as probably it will be asked, whether any definite and substantial good has resulted from the labors of Kant and his followers,” Hedge replies: Much. More than metaphysics ever before accomplished, these men have done for the advancement of the human intellect. It is true the immediate, and if we may so speak, the calculable results of their speculations are not so numerous nor so evident as might have been expected: these are chiefly comprised under the head of method. Yet even here we have enough to make us rejoice that such men have been, and that they have lived and spoken in our day. We need mention only the sharp and rightly dividing lines that have been drawn within and around the kingdom of human knowledge; the strongly marked distinctions of subject and object, reason and understanding, phenomena and noumena;—the categories established by Kant; the moral liberty proclaimed by him as it had never been proclaimed by any before. (93)

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Yet, “in mentioning these things, which are the direct results of the critical philosophy, we have,” as Hedge acknowledges, “by no means exhausted all that that philosophy has done for liberty and truth” (93). Moreover, “a philosophy which has given such an impulse to mental culture and scientific research, which has done so much to establish and to extend the spiritual in man, and the ideal in nature, needs no apology” (93–94). The general influence of Kant on self-analysis humbles conceit and vanity. “By shifting the focus and location of understanding to intuitive and inherent Reason,” as Taylor expounds, “Kant was able to free the process of accumulating knowledge from a slavish dependence on the unreliable sensory acquisition of the phenomenal world” (127). Hedge summarizes this critical philosophy in terms that Taylor recognizes as “remarkably prescient of Isabel’s conception of herself” in James’s The Portrait of a Lady as an absolute self that determines all things through that self. Kant stresses the vital importance of Würdigkeit or unconditional dignity. While dignity generally connotes formal reserve, seriousness of manner and appearance, and behavior worthy of honor or esteem, “Kant uses ‘dignity,’” as Derek Parfit explains in On What Matters (2011–17), “to mean supreme value or worth” (1:12).3 This worth “is not a kind of goodness” (2:161); rather, “people have dignity or value in the quite different sense that, given their nature as rational beings, they must always be treated in certain helpful or respectful ways” (1:241).4 As Michael Mack summarizes, “traditional humanism from the rationalism of Plato and Aristotle to that of Augustine and Aquinas and then Descartes and Kant has distinguished humanity’s dignity by its capacity of making sense” (675). Kant’s concept of Würdigkeit and Aristotle’s concept of ergon partially overlap. In each case, this proper, common activity, or end, or essence operates in accordance with reason. “To simply produce a good, or to act merely in accordance with given moral expectations, does not amount to morality,” observes Philip J. Kain of the Kantian understanding of ethics. “To act morally, one must know rationally what the good is, and the act must be motivated by this rational knowledge” (295). While acquainted with the European philosophical tradition, Henry James, Sr., not only rejected transcendentalism but also challenged the primacy that Kant bestowed on reason. “Life presupposes organization,” asserts James, Sr., in Substance and Shadow (1863),

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It begins only where organization ends or is perfected; and to look for it therefore among the mere contents of organization, or in any analysis however subtle of existence, would be like looking into the works of a watch to ascertain the time of day. Undoubtedly the works of a watch are all presupposed in the creative spirit of the watch, which is its distinctive use; just as our physical organization involving in itself the universe of sense, is presupposed in our conscious life or selfhood. But what would you think of a droll, who, when you asked him the time of day, should insist upon consulting the bowels of his watch rather than its dial-plate. (298)

James, Sr., decries this sort of erroneous insistence as “the precise infatuation of the Kantian philosophy.” When asked about “creative substance or spirit,” this methodological fixation provides “an analysis of constitutive surface or body.” When asked “what creates things, or gives them absolute being irrespective of our intelligence,” this methodological fixation provides a discourse on “what produces them to sense.” When asked about “the great supernal mystery of selfhood or Life,” this methodological fixation answers with “the purely subterranean fact of existence” (299). In short, James, Sr., doggedly attacks the notions of Kant, as Taylor traces, “suggesting that the German thinker had erroneously elevated the phenomenal to the realm of the intuitive, so placing man at the centre of the philosophical universe and denying philosophy’s true vocation, an examination of the divinely ordered spiritual world” (127). The James brothers, who “learned through experience, by appreciating, digesting, adapting to, and embedding themselves in the world into which they were thrown” (Thrailkill 14), were well apprized through their father’s table talk and published discourses of the multifarious debates concerning Kant. The Ambassadors, which appeared in print twenty-two years after The Portrait of a Lady, illustrates Henry’s continued and deep awareness of these philosophical discussions. In the later of these two works, the novel on which Nussbaum dwells in “Perceptive Equilibrium,” the widowed Mrs. Newsome, the embodiment of a specific philosophical outlook, sends her fiancé Lewis Lambert Strether to Europe. She tasks him with bringing home to Woollett, Massachusetts, her son Chad, who is romantically and waywardly involved with the married, but separated, Madame de Vionnet. Strether is Mrs. Newsome’s first ambassador. That the word “Newsome” is phonically close to the word “nuisance” is no coincidence. James surely intends Mrs. Newsome and her son to be tiresome nuisances. Mrs. Newsome is “an implacable, immobile force,

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intransigent and exigent” (Leon Edel 76). Chad is a cosmopolite for whom the eponymous character’s scorn from James’s earlier novel The Princess Casamassima (1886) is entirely appropriate. “He is what they call a cosmopolite,” opines the princess of Captain Sholto. “I don’t know whether you know that species; very modern, more and more frequent, and exceedingly tiresome” (201). From Nussbaum’s perspective, the philosophical Mrs. Newsome is annoyingly uncommon in inquiring in a pure, detached manner; her apprehension and measurement of what happens to and between people is, “as Kant thought, a priori” (“PE” 245). Mrs. Newsome is, in effect, a Kantian. “It is interesting to note how often commentators identify Mrs. Newsome with philosophical positions,” adduces Collin Meissner, “especially those positions that claim to possess a surefire method for understanding and behavior” (133). As the struggles of Kantian philosophers since the passing of Kant evince, however, they do not claim any such possession but painstakingly attempt to refine the borders of ethical understanding, moral judgment, and acceptable individual, group, and state behavior. What is more, other than citing Nussbaum, Meissner explicitly names only one other commentator on Mrs. Newsome’s philosophical position, Ross Posnock.5 For Posnock, Mrs. Newsome embraces “implacable rationality” (225), a circumscription that her fiancé will eventually recognize and “violently repudiate” (245)—although Strether’s violence will be of a purely intellectual kind—describing his erstwhile fiancée as “all cold thought” (The Ambassadors 391), then as “fine cold thought” (The Ambassadors 392). Put succinctly, Mrs. Newsome is an “austere presence” (“PE” 247), as Nussbaum observes, a presence that casts withal a long and chilling shadow. “Impervious to surprise, idealistic and exceptionless in her justice” (“PE” 247), as Nussbaum relates, Mrs. Newsome is unemotional and calculating. She prioritizes moral right; her principled thoughts exhibit conceptual rigor; and the ethical rules by which she abides preclude the consideration of extenuating circumstances. Mrs. Newsome exists according to the “idea of an exceptionless justice that dwells outside” (“PE” 248), with her annoyingly reductive interpretation of human experience identifying three qualities of supposed danger—particularity, passivity, and emotionality—qualities toward which she exhibits an almost Platonic aversion. As Nussbaum remarks in “The Discernment of Perception,” Plato often gives “the pejorative name of ‘madness’” to the intellect led or guided by emotion or appetite, madness that “is definitionally contrasted

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with rationality or soundness of judgment” (76). In fine, as Nussbaum concludes in “Perceptive Equilibrium,” people of the Newsome kind “come to a situation determined that it should not touch them, holding their general and rather abstract principles fixed and firm” (249). As a tacit advocate of achieving reflective equilibrium, Mrs. Newsome acts as a moral sounding board for Strether, whom Nussbaum interprets as a tacit self-inductee into the quest for perceptive equilibrium. For Strether, as Nussbaum notes, Mrs. Newsome “motivates his own obsession with discipline and punishment” (“PE” 248), a fixation that is not cold and calculating, but that is full of what James’s heterodiegetic narrator calls “conscientious wonder” (37) and the “candour of fancy” (39). Beyond Kantianism, John Rawls’s version of Kantianism, and Utilitarianism, there is, then, “another way to be rational and moral,” as asserted and advocated by Nussbaum, “a way that is more hospitable to life” (“PE” 250), and James’s figuration of Strether delineates this alternative. Indeed, at various times Strether exhibits the three main dangers that Mrs. Newsome identifies with unchecked existence: particularity, passiveness, and emotionality. Strether willingly surrenders what Nussbaum calls “the invulnerable agency of the Kantian self” (“PE” 251); his life embraces bewilderment and hesitation; these mental states become essential to his sense of being. For Nussbaum, such feelings of indeterminacy are part of life’s “accuracy” (“PE” 252), and the facilitating surrender is more often “joyous” (“PE” 251) than cheerless. Strether “permits himself to be treated, persistently, as an agent of the purposes of others” (“PE” 255). This submissiveness, which Strether finds intuitively acceptable, empowers his preparation for another sort of strength: receptivity to the influences of perception. As Nussbaum remarks, Strether demonstrates “a willingness to surrender invulnerability, to take up a posture of agency that is porous and susceptible of influence,” a willingness that “is of the highest importance in getting an accurate perception of particular things in the world.” While periodically experiencing perplexities, difficulties, and insecurities, Strether’s “life also seems to Strether—and to us—to be richer, fuller of enjoyment” (“PE” 252) than Mrs. Newsome’s existence is. The richness of Strether’s existence stands in marked contrast to the starkness of Mrs. Newsome’s life. In effect, Strether verifies what Nussbaum identifies as Aristotle’s procedure for determining how one should live, “work[ing] through the major alternative views about the good life, holding them up, in each case, against our own experience and our intuitions” (“PE” 245).

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This process results in a preference for perception before and above reflection. “Holding Strether up against Rawls’s idea of considered judgment and his constraints upon admissible theories,” declares Nussbaum, “we want to object that emotions may after all in many cases be an invaluable guide to correct judgment.” Universal formulations might simply be inadequate in the face of individual situations of even moderate complexity. “Immersed particular judgments may have a moral value that reflective and general judgments cannot capture” (“PE” 254). Judgments of the former kind can still attain a state of balance, and such an equilibrium, which underpins James’s account of perception in The Ambassadors, contradicts the norms associated with judgments of the latter kind. Thus, although reflective norms “prevail in almost all of the Western ethical tradition,” as Nussbaum notes, “we encounter inside philosophy several friends of perception and of literary insight” (“PE” 262), a band of allies that includes “Bernard Williams, Hilary Putnam, and Iris Murdoch” (“PE” 243). “It is partly against deconstructive approaches,” observe Liesbeth Korthals Altes and Hanna Meretoja, “that [Nussbaum] revives Aristotle’s thinking on virtue ethics, arguing that for our everyday experience of moral issues, the Aristotelean notion of practical wisdom, phronesis, is more adequate than abstract, general, moral theories.” To “feel, act, and reflect morally,” explain Korthals Altes and Meretoja of Nussbaum’s approach, “we need a well-developed imagination, plus moral guidelines that can be adapted to concrete situations” (606). Relations between the imaginative faculty and the rational mind help to separate Nussbaum’s perceptive approach from Rawls’s reflective alternative. Whereas Rawls argues that imagination informs rationality, Nussbaum worries about how “often,” as she states in Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (1995), “refusals of sympathy are aided and abetted by an excessive reliance on technical ways of modeling human behavior, especially those that derive from economic utilitarianism” (xvi), arguing that imagination determines rationality.6 Nussbaum is seemingly oblivious, however, to the historical strand of philosophical neglect that Philippa Foot identified and sought to redress from the 1970s onward: that two-hundred-year-old blindness to the virtues and vices. More particularly, Nussbaum’s attempt to conciliate literary theory and ethical theory with reference to The Ambassadors falters, because although James’s Strether is alive to perceptive nuances, his exposure to physical discomfort, personal danger, or any form of distress is

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extremely limited, as are his concomitant feelings. Strether’s secession of his own dignity is a decadent act, one easily afforded by his elevated sociopolitical status. Personal invulnerability means Strether’s surrender of self-­ respect is either a feint or an indulgence. Most of his contemporaries—people of low social standing whom James rarely delineates and never considers in depth—neither possess nor can afford this luxury. Strether’s defiance of Mrs. Newsome’s approach to life, whatever the explicitness of that challenge, is never egregious: his ontological attitude never discounts social norms. More to the point, Strether’s tacit acceptance of the preeminence of perceptive equilibrium results from a reflective process rather than from reactive feelings: his “wonder” is, as Nussbaum herself remarks in citing James’s novel, “conscientious” (“PE” 241). As a majoritarian writer who presents majoritarian characters, James can enable figures such as Mrs. Newsome and Strether to pursue abstract inquires into how one should live, because severe sociopolitical challenges rarely (if ever) confront them (and the same could be said of many of Iris Murdoch’s characters too).7 James’s characters are so detached from the everyday that events of significance either occur out of sight or linger beyond their welcome. Isabel Archer’s marriage to Gilbert Osmond in The Portrait of a Lady and Milly Theale’s demise in The Wings of the Dove (1902) exemplify Jamesian elision. Hilary M. Schor confirms the former instance: “Isabel’s decision to marry Gilbert, her seemingly fatal choice, t[akes] place off stage” (34). Jeffrey Meyers confirms the latter instance: “Some of the most significant scenes in the book (Kate Croy’s visit to Merton Densher’s rooms, Lord Mark’s revelations to Milly, Densher’s last interview with Milly, and the death of Milly) are merely alluded to but not actually rendered.” The Wings of the Dove also exemplifies James’s tendency toward unwarranted prolongation, what Meyers calls the “tediously procrastinated revelations” of the author’s “tortuous style” (19). Even the perceptions of James’s characters have their limitations. E.  M. Forster’s finely modulated judgment from Aspects of the Novel (1927) verifies this rebuke. On the one hand, Forster traces and appreciates the single-minded precision of James’s artistry. “James knew exactly what he wanted, he pursued the narrow path of aesthetic duty, and success to the full extent of his possibilities has crowned him.” On the other hand, Forster traces and deplores the concomitant losses. “But at what sacrifice! So enormous is the sacrifice that many readers cannot get interested in James, although they can follow what he says (his difficulty has been much exaggerated), and can appreciate his effects. They cannot grant his

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premise, which is that most of human life has to disappear before he can do us a novel” (228). James the artist is a Mrs. Newsome, not a Strether; his art is inhospitable to life. James’s characters, their lives and contexts, fail to captivate. As Forster concludes: They are incapable of fun, of rapid motion, of carnality, and of nine-tenths of heroism. Their clothes will not take off, the diseases that ravage them are anonymous, like the sources of their incomes, their servants are noiseless or resemble themselves, no social explanation of the world we know is possible from them, for there are no stupid people in their world, no barriers of language, and no poor. Even their sensations are limited. They can land in Europe and look at works of art and each other, but that is all. Maimed creatures can alone breathe in Henry James’ pages—maimed yet specialized. (229–30)

The interminable reflections on nuanced perceptions afforded to so many of the leading characters in James’s later novels serve to alienate most readers. The novel with which James ended his major phase as an author, The Golden Bowl (1904), forces these alienating aspects to their limit. On 22 October 1905, having read the novel, William James sent Henry what Robert D. Richardson describes as “perhaps the most censorious letter he ever wrote to his brother” (464). William praises Henry’s “brilliance and cleanness of effect,” but excoriates his brother’s “method of narration by interminable elaboration of suggestive reference” (301). As Daniel Brudney concludes, “The Golden Bowl is a quintessential Jamesian novel,” a novel in which “almost nothing happens.” During the long narrative, “there are two marriages, one affair, and a single act of violence, the smashing of the golden bowl. The rest is reflection, nuance, detail” (397). James is a writerly, rather than a readerly, author. “The literary language James developed in his fiction,” observes Mary Cross, “depicts in all its overdeterminedness a struggle with the waywardness of language, and dramatises his attempt to control it, his own doomed quest for truth and inclusiveness” (3). The textual results of James’s approach exhibit fullness, extravagance, and wantonness. “Temporising in a syntax of deferral and doubling, using words at such highly abstract levels as to jam and appropriate their reference—problematised further in syntax—and offering up a play of difference in his own packed clauses,” as Cross maintains, “James allowed language its range and plenitude in his style” (3–4). In sum, James “risk[ed] the text’s entropy and collapse at the same time as he struggled

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for absolutes and unity of form,” appearing “to have joined language at its own game, his style a strategy for transcending its ‘laws’ and its flaws” (4). James’s overdetermined language bespeaks authorial reflection rather than perception; the result in The Ambassadors is figurative bifurcation. While Mrs. Newsome is perceptively reflective, Strether is reflectively perceptive. There is little surprise, therefore, that Nussbaum’s choice of literary exemplar, as she herself admits, is inhospitable to her overall aim of conciliating literary theory and ethical theory. “I propose an apparently thankless task” (“PE” 263), she concedes. Is there any reason at all to suppose that entrenched conceptions (of rationality, of value) that currently govern our daily lives through their reception in economic theory and public policy will be modified by contact with Lambert Strether, or that the holders of these conceptions will pay any attention at all to Henry James and related authors at any time? Can any possible practicable goal be achieved by subtle precise writing about books that most people in public life do not read anyway? (“PE” 263–64)

Subtle precise writing about subtle precise writing is subtle precise writing raised to the power of two, and Nussbaum’s own conclusion to her subtly conflated intervention is at once ironically lame and congruously grandiose. “Well,” she submits in the first instance, “what can we do but try?” (“PE” 264). The perceptive equilibrium of a Strether, she submits in the second instance, might be capable of informing the reflective equilibria of arbiters of justice. “Some major choices affecting our lives—say, Supreme Court decisions—[are] made in effect by one or two complex reflective processes in the minds of one or two reading, thinking, feeling beings. An eloquent piece of writing (say, about James on the moral value of privacy) might possibly alter the course of that reflection. Do we know such things before attempting?” (“PE” 264). “Literature has the ability to imbue law with the language of feeling” ([2017] 86), writes Julia J. A. Shaw, “situat[ing] institutions such as slavery and poverty within a discourse of emotional judgement” ([2017] 94). Emotive literature acts “as a form of sentimental jurisprudence” ([2018] 546), and while invoking Walt Whitman’s appeal for good judgments for good societies, Nussbaum herself associates compassion with liberal politics. “The poetic imagination is a crucial agent of democratic equality for excluded people,” she insists in “Poets as Judges: Judicial Rhetoric and the Judicial Imagination” (1995), “since only that imagination will get the facts of their lives right and see in their unequal treatment a degradation

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of oneself” (1519). The corollary of such a stance, avers Shaw, “is that the poet as wordsmith, rather than the politician or even less the lawyer, has the unique ability to evoke and appeal to one’s ‘love of justice’” ([2018] 546). “Literary art is an essential part of the formation of the judge—and, more generally,” insists Nussbaum in “Poets as Judges,” “of the formation of citizenship and public life” (1519). Lawyers and judges “are unable to remove themselves, in either ethical or jurisprudential terms, from the stories of others,” concurs Shaw, “which suggests the usefulness of inculcating in legal advocates a narrative empathy, by the sharing of feeling and common perspective stimulated by reading, hearing, seeing, or imagining narratives which articulate another individual’s position” ([2018] 554). Nonetheless, as Nussbaum admits, “the literary imagination is a part of public rationality, and not the whole.” In fact, “I believe that it would be extremely dangerous to suggest substituting empathetic imagining for rule-governed moral reasoning, and I am not making that suggestion.” Instead, “I defend the literary imagination precisely because it seems to me an essential ingredient of an ethical stance that asks us to concern ourselves with the good of other people whose lives are distant from our own” (PJ xvi). After questioning in “Perceptive Equilibrium” whether the efficacy of literature to inform jurisprudence can be known before attempting to do so, Nussbaum quotes from Henry James’s “Preface to The Lesson of the Master” (1907) on what she calls “the task of the literary imagination” when confronted with “social obtuseness” and a “general failure of perception” (“PE” 264). James’s response to these supposed misfortunes is to create an archetype. As if answering Forster’s future intimations in Aspects of the Novel, the elevated perception of this majoritarian arbiter deigns both to counsel and to uplift the limited minds of its minoritarian counterparts. “What one would accordingly fain to do is to baffle any such calamity, to create the record, in default of any other enjoyment of it; to imagine, in a word, the honourable, the producible case. What better example than this of the high and the helpful public and, as it were, civic use of the imagination?” (222–23; emphasis original). Posnock regrets the failure of literary critics “to take seriously James’s civic ambition,” these commentators “attend[ing] solely to James’s immediate concern to defend the ‘supersubtle’ characters of his short stories of artists and writers” (188); and while Nussbaum counters this tendency in considering the novels of James in terms of civic usefulness, she misses the

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point that James’s sociopolitical lesson about the imagination establishes that tutorial explicitly, yet unwittingly, on the principle of dignity. “If the life about us for the last thirty years refuses warrant for these examples,” maintains James in “Preface to The Lesson of the Master” of his literary protagonists, “then so much the worse for that life. The constatation would be so deplorable that instead of making it we must dodge it: there are decencies that in the name of general self-respect we must take for granted, there’s a kind of rudimentary intellectual honour to which we must, in the interest of civilization, at least pretend” (222; emphasis original). The ethical point about basic ratiocinative respect, however, is that first-order intolerances must not deny that respect or its associated decencies; such prejudicial agents preclude themselves from civic usefulness. Nussbaum’s interpretation of James’s interpretation of Kant is correct; Nussbaum agrees with James’s reading; but James’s interpretation is flawed. Like his father before him, James rejects Hedge’s avowed enthusiasm for “all that is most valuable in the speculations of Kant and his followers” (87). James’s interpretation of Kant precludes the delineation of social insensitivity. That inclusion would expose at once the true nature of that social failure and the fallaciousness of James’s interpretation of Kant. A novel from James’s major phase as an author, such as The Ambassadors, is not only a textually less than approachable choice but also a philosophically more than unsound choice for literary–philosophical study. Yet, in pursuing a theory of perceptive equilibrium, one that seeks to attune literary thought and ethical theory, Nussbaum herself proffers a remedy for her dilemma: “We need to pursue in much greater depth and detail the stylistic portion of my argument, saying a great deal more, in connection with many more authors and many different genres and styles” (“PE” 257). Indeed, notwithstanding her admiration for James, Nussbaum herself supplies a more suitable example for ethical and literary consilience: the trials of Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940). For, while “speaking about social equality” in Poetic Justice, Nussbaum self-avowedly, though fleetingly, “turn[s] to Wright” (11). In the spring semester of 1994, she recounts, “I taught law students for the first time, as a visiting professor in the law school at the University of Chicago,” and her treatise on literary imagination and public life “owes a great deal to these experiences.” Having acknowledged “the University of Chicago Law School [as] the birthplace of the law-and-economics movement” in the United States, Nussbaum and her students “discussed the relationship between

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the literary imagination and economic reasoning.” They also considered “more concrete social issues, including gender, homosexuality, and race”; and, “in a lecture hall less than fifty yards away from the black metal fence in the law school parking lot that marks the ‘line’ between the world of the university and the world of the inner-city Chicago slums, in a class with only one African-American member in seventy, we read Richard Wright’s Native Son” (xiv). As Nussbaum recalls, she and her students recognized every named site in the novel, “though with respect to some of those locations,” she concedes, “almost all of us were in the position of Wright’s Mary Dalton, when she says to Bigger Thomas that she has no idea how people live ten blocks away from her” (PJ xiv).8 Nussbaum’s class discussed the relevance of such ignorance “to disputes about discretion and mercy in criminal sentencing—about a Supreme Court decision that instructs courts to treat defendants not ‘as members of a faceless, undifferentiated mass’ but ‘as uniquely individual human beings.’” In short, she asked the class, “what might the role of a novel such as Wright’s be, in conveying to future judges and lawyers an understanding of that requirement?” (PJ xv). Her students concluded that discussing such a work “at least begins to give white readers a knowledge of their ignorance, and to introduce habits of ‘fancying’ that it is crucial to develop if we are to deliberate well about race” (PJ 93). Nussbaum’s turn to Wright’s Native Son, however welcome, is disproportionately fleeting, however, and fails to engage specifically with either perception, reflection, or the search to reconcile literary theory and ethical theory. “Nussbaum is explicitly committed to a particular understanding of morality,” as Korthals Altes and Meretoja recognize. “Her adoption of the common good as a moral standard justifies her limited selection of ethically relevant writers, making aesthetic concerns subservient to the moral” (606). This subservience assumes the need for a writerly author to illustrate her arguments concerning perceptive equilibrium, rather than a readerly one. Nor does Nussbaum find ethical worth in morally ambiguous texts—“works […] which may have,” as Korthals Altes and Meretoja suggest, “their own ethical relevance” (606)—for example, creations of the sort penned by modernists and postmodernists. “One thing that becomes very clear, as we read these,” states Nussbaum of Samuel Beckett’s novels, “is that we are hearing, in the end, but a single human voice, not the conversation of diverse human voices with diverse structures of feeling.” Beckett’s divergence from the great novelists whom

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he “would, in his youth, have read, such as Henry James,” goes too far for Nussbaum, and this separation indicts Beckett’s tendencies as sterile and nihilistic. Even so, as the questions elicited by Beckett’s art indicate, his works continue to perplex Nussbaum. Have writers such as James, she asks, “failed to see something about our society that Beckett sees more clearly? Or isn’t it, instead, because in the lives they depict and the sense of life they express, these problems really are not central?” (LK 308). As Nussbaum’s questions infer, she cannot and will not accommodate the postmodern with its penchant for irony, parody, self-consciousness, fragmentation, and playful self-reflexivity. “Nor does Nussbaum really pay attention to literary form and fictional mediation itself,” confirm Korthals Altes and Meretoja. “Her readings concentrate on characters’ moral development, which she discusses as if they were real people” (606). Whereas Nussbaum favors literature from the nineteenth or early twentieth century, which the genres of realism and proto-modernism respectively dominate, many of her contemporaries, including Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-François Lyotard, and Andrew Gibson, favor literature from the later twentieth or early twenty-first century, which the genres of modernism and postmodernism respectively dominate, with Gibson explaining how “the postmodern, ethical philosopher joins the avantgarde artist in tending the ‘empty centre,’ in protecting it from the relentless advance of positivity” (76). Gibson draws his own negative ethics, therefore, from Levinas, whose (anti-)system of morality understands the ego as an incessant burgeoning from within, closed to the infinite from without. “The ego is not just a being endowed with certain qualities called moral which it would bear as a substance bears attributes, or which it would take on as accidents in its becoming,” explains Levinas; rather, “its exceptional uniqueness in the passivity or the passion of the self is the incessant event of subjection to everything, of substitution” (117). In the overarching context of the present volume, however, the genuinely avant-garde, that which is both postmodern and poststructural, also embraces the writerly—avant-gardism forcing that authorial condition in particularly recondite directions—thereby posing similar difficulties to those encountered by Nussbaum’s literary choice of Henry James for conciliating literary and ethical theories. Hence, the necessary and sufficient remedy to Nussbaum’s dilemma ought to choose: hospitable (readerly) literature; minoritarian authors whose minoritarian protagonists face severe sociopolitical challenges; minoritarian protagonists whose responses to these challenges often combine the reflective and the perceptive (as,

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separately but in sum, Mrs. Newsome and Strether do in the rarified ambience of The Ambassadors), yet whose moral choices demand that reflection dominates (or even silences) perception. As she fleetingly demonstrates in Poetic Justice, Nussbaum can and does consider readerly authors, but not in the contexts of perception and reflection nor in the quest for theoretical consilience. The remedy to Nussbaum’s dilemma ought to choose hospitable texts because they eschew stylistic lubriciousness, affording wider readerly significance and thus greater importance than Nussbaum’s illustrations from Henry James do. Ironically, this turn to the readerly necessitates grappling both with Kant and with what Mathew Abbott calls Kant’s “difficult style and idiosyncratic vocabulary” (233). The second remedial condition, which concerns the minoritarian protagonists of minoritarian authors attempting to negotiate severe sociopolitical conditions, arises from the fact that a certain form of discrimination truly undermines, or lies within, majoritarian preconceptions and subsequent perceptions. Ruling status provides majoritarians with a sense of Würdigkeit that is anything but unconditional. They routinely assume that minoritarians (unlike themselves) cannot incorporate such dignity. In the examples Nussbaum chooses from The Ambassadors, while Mrs. Newsome automatically assumes her dignity and Strether willing (or decadently) cedes his, the dignity of minoritarians goes unnoticed. While being human involves both reflection and perception, minoritarians often find themselves fighting reflective battles, as the third remedial condition stipulates, battles that majoritarians discount in assuming that reflective abilities fall outside the purview of these (supposedly) lesser agents. For Nussbaum, again exposing her majoritarian credentials, “art does not simply perceive life; it also comforts us by keeping us at a distance from life’s violence and arbitrariness” (“PE” 258). In contrast, minoritarian authors often aim to discomfort their readers, and this aim responds more forcibly to Nussbaum’s argument in favor of the literary informing the philosophical—“it can make a contribution to ethical theory” (“PE” 261)—than her appeals to Henry James do. Minor (more than major) literature asks the reader to gauge the limits of how one ought to live. This other literature, to redirect Nussbaum’s argument, “gestures toward the limits of ethical consciousness, making us aware of the deep elements in our ethical life that in their violence or intensity lead us outside of the ethical attitude altogether, outside of the quest for balanced vision and perfect rightness” (“PE” 261). While “the explicit and deep study of ethical

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theory will, first of all, clarify to us just what it is that works of literature offer to our sense of life” (“PE” 262), a similar approach to minor literature will begin to clarify what ethical theories offer to our understanding of personal and collective behavior. The distinction Richard Rorty discerns between two kinds of literature suggests a minoritarian author whose readerly works contrast sharply yet productively with those of Henry James. “Fiction like that of Choderlos de Laclos, Henry James, or Nabokov gives us the details about what sorts of cruelty we ourselves are capable of, and thereby lets us redescribe ourselves,” states Rorty. “Fiction like that of Dickens, Olive Schreiner, or Richard Wright gives us the details about kinds of suffering being endured by people to whom we have previously not attended” (xvi). Searching for a literature of morals, Tommie Shelby, whose remarks on the “perils involved in using literary fiction for ethical reflection” (515) have already been quoted, also turns to Wright. For, in observing how “a number of philosophers have sought to better understand our moral lives through the study of literature” (514–15), Shelby not only cites Nussbaum and Bernard Williams alongside Colin McGinn and Robert Pippin (515n2) but also underscores that observation in focusing his analysis on Wright. Despite methodological concerns, Shelby “think[s] Wright’s stories contain and convey real moral wisdom” (515), and Wright hereby provides a common thread between Nussbaum in Poetic Justice, Rorty, and Shelby. Like Henry James, Richard Wright acknowledged the importance of both literature and philosophy, but Wright’s subtlety and precision as a minoritarian author are of a different order to James’s subtlety and precision as a majoritarian counterpart. Like James, Wright possessed a philosophical aptitude, but Wright’s propensity was forged and tempered in the African-American milieu of the postbellum Southern States, not in the cultural and intellectual circles of New York City and Newport, Rhode Island. Like James, Wright believed literature could be transformative, but from the opposite social direction to James’s orientation. Wright “was absolutely awestruck,” as Richard Yarborough documents, “by the apparent capacity of literature to act, even to do violence, in the world” (xv), with an early influence being journalist and social commentator H. L. Mencken (1880–1956). As Vincent Fitzpatrick documents, “the Mencken who spoke of the ‘eternal tragedy of man’ had only contempt for uplifting literature” of the Jamesian kind, which he deemed, in Fitzpatrick’s apposite terminology, “a hoax perpetrated by the unenlightened upon the credulous” (47; emphasis

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added). While “Mencken chastised a number of writers for their timidity,” as Fitzpatrick adduces, “he attacked […] Henry James most frequently and ferociously.” Mencken “found odious the complexities of the Jamesian style” and believed that “James’s sheltered perspective precluded a full understanding of the harsher realities of the American scene” (45). To Mencken, as he states in “The Leading American Novelist” (1911), “James is no more an American than the Sultan of Sulu” (163). As a cosseted aesthete, “James would be vastly improved,” suggests Mencken in “Notes in the Margin” (1920), “by a few whiffs from the” Chicago stockyards (141). These judgments stood in stark contrast to Mencken’s attitude toward minoritarian authors. “More than any other critic in American letters, black or white,” relates Charles Scruggs, “Mencken made it possible for the black writer to be treated as a fellow laborer in the vineyard” (7). “Wright used to read the Memphis Commercial Appeal regularly during the years 1926–1927,” relates Michel Fabre in “Richard Wright’s First Hundred Books” (1973), “and a close scrutiny here should yield interesting information on possible early influences. A quick perusal of the microfilm at the Memphis Public Library enabled me to locate not one Mencken article,” as one might surmise from Wright’s single reference to the newspaper in his memoir Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth (1945), “but half a dozen of them; for example, ‘Notes on Government’ (January 10, 1926, Sect. I, p. 9); ‘A Chance for a Millionaire’ (January 24, 1926, p. 26); ‘Essays in Constructive Criticism’ (March 1926, Sect. III, p. 8), in which Proust and Joyce are mentioned, as well as an editorial on Mencken (‘The Joke is on Mencken,’ June 9, 1926, p. 6)” (459).9 Mencken’s erudition was immense. “Among contemporary American writers,” as Hazel Rowley enumerates, “Mencken admired Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, and Stephen Crane”; he also appreciated “Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis” (46).10 In his turn, adds Rowley, “Wright eagerly read the books Mencken admired so much” (47), with American naturalists and realists becoming another influence on him. As Yarborough notes, these authors at once “emphasized the power of external forces to shape personality” (xv) and “showed Wright that although blacks may have suffered disproportionately under the exploitative social system in the United States, they were not its only victims” (xvi). These influences persuaded Wright that external forces did not shape the lives of African Americans alone; they persuaded him, as Fabre notes in “Beyond Naturalism” (1987), “that his life, hemmed in by poverty and racism, was

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not the only life to be circumscribed” (41). In fine, as Yarborough concludes, Wright soon came to share “the social realists’ commitment to focusing on the lives of working people vying desperately not just with the whims of a godless world but also with the racism and economic exploitation that, in their overwhelming insistence, themselves become tantamount to natural forces” (xxi–xxii). Notwithstanding his approval of realism, Menken believed that these writers should have gone further, as he explicitly argues in “Puritanism as a Literary Force” (1917). “They begin to shock once they describe an asthma attack or a steak burning below stairs,” but members of the realist school such as William Dean Howells “never penetrate beneath the flow of social concealments and urbanities to the passions that actually move men and women to their acts, and the great forces that circumscribe and condition personality” (276). Wright recognized what Mencken called “this dearth of courage and even of curiosity” (276), and while Wright’s familiarity with “naturalists such as Dreiser and Norris, for instance, is quite evident, particularly in his depiction of human survival as often entailing struggle at the most immediate, physical level” (Yarborough xxi), he wanted to go further in depicting minoritarian lives. Wright wished to delineate not only their passions, as commonly anticipated by majoritarian readers, but also their thoughts, as commonly precluded by that readership. As Yarborough traces, however, research on the naturalist and realist influences on Wright’s work has “tend[ed] to obscure the importance of other crucial literary sources” (xxii); and beyond the influence of Marxism, which would prompt his call for African-American nationalism during the 1930s, Wright’s philosophical grounding and its expression in his literature have suffered a similar analytical fate. “One of the major problems with Wright scholarship or criticism is a lack of understanding of his major ideas,” confirms Margaret Walker. On the one hand, “a number of scholars (chiefly black scholars) namely, Nick Aaron Ford, Nathan Scott, and George E.  Kent, have dealt with his racial strivings and to some extent with his literary efforts.” On the other hand, “white critics have chosen to deal with his sociology or political ideology, but their assessments of his intellect stop short of an appraisal of his philosophical approaches or an exposition of his ideas. Among these whites are Leslie Fiedler, R. P. Blackmur, and Granville Hicks” (113). When Wright eventually moved to Europe in 1946, he immediately formed literary contacts in Paris, and Jean-Paul Sartre, the father of

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existentialism, became a close friend. As Nick Aaron Ford documents, Wright was “converted to his friend’s philosophy” (91), and Walker focuses her own investigation of Wright’s major ideas on his existentialist postwar years in Europe. Her documentation of the authorial context for The Outsider (1953), a novel in which protagonist Cross Damon personifies Wright himself, exemplifies this focus. “Wright spent the better part of 1952 in London writing The Outsider,” relates Walker. “It was the result of nearly seven years of thoughtful consideration and reading of the basic tenets of existentialism and his understanding of such exponents as Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Karl Jaspers, and Camus” (236). Disappointingly, though, Walker surveys, rather than analyses, these influences. In contradistinction, Nathan A. Scott analyzes Wright’s philosophical tendencies, but like Walker, confines his study to Wright’s postwar years: The existentialist overtones and the explicit allusions to Nietzsche and Heidegger in The Outsider led some of the reviewers of his book of 1953 to conclude that Richard Wright was misguidedly experimenting with intellectual traditions outside the ambiance of his actual experience and that he had taken a wrong turning. This was a judgment, however, which surely had to require as its basic premise something like the rather incomprehensible mystique about the Negro intellectual which James Baldwin has pushed in Notes of a Native Son, that he is somehow ancestrally fated to exclusion from the general Atlantic community of cultural exchange—simply because his racial identity does itself, in some ineffable way, consign him to a permanent ghetto of the mind. (337)

If these reviewers had discounted Baldwin’s contention, however, “there should have been no occasion for surprise at the expression which The Outsider provided of the extent to which Mr. Wright, after several years of residence in France, had been influenced by the secular modes of European existentialism” (Walker 337). Wright’s “philosophical journey had progressed in the same way as his physical odyssey: from Mississippi and folk religion to Chicago and Marxism, to New  York and Paris and secular existentialism” (Walker 236). Moreover, while Henry James, Sr., attacked Kantian notions that elevated the phenomenal to the intuitive, “Wright made an effort,” as Charles Johnson reports, “to learn Husserlian phenomenology from one of its most important practitioners, Jean-Paul

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Sartre” (93). In sum, then, as Nick Aaron Ford concludes, “Wright ha[d] come a long way in the art of philosophic thought” (94). Yet, thanks to his intellectual hunger, Wright’s Chicagoan train of thought during the late 1920s, his journey of consciousness before “the Communist Party philosophy caught his imagination and he joined the Party in Chicago (1932)” (David Bakish 3), his journey of consciousness from Mississippi to and including Chicago, was also freighted with philosophical ideas of a nonpolitical order. Wright recounts something of this formative erudition in a vignette, which titularly announces its moral credentials, and which would constitute the first chapter in Uncle Tom’s Children: “The Ethics of Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch” (1936). Between 1925 and 1927, while working for an optical company in Memphis, as Wright relates, “I was always borrowing books from men on the job” (13). He was determined to read widely. “I knew that Negroes had never been allowed to catch the full spirit of Western civilization, that they lived somehow in it but not of it,” he later recalls in Black Boy. “And when I brooded upon the cultural barrenness of black life, I wondered if clean, positive tenderness, love, honor, and the capacity to remember were native with man” (33). Eventually, as Wright recounts of his time in Memphis in “The Ethics of Jim Crow,” “I mustered enough courage to ask one of the men to let me get books from the library in his name. Surprisingly, he consented. I cannot help but think that he consented because he was a Roman Catholic and felt a vague sympathy for Negroes, being himself an object of hatred.” Hereafter, “armed with a library card, I obtained books in the following manner: I would write a note to the librarian, saying: ‘Please let this n****r boy have the following books.’ I would then sign it with the white man’s name” (13–14; emphasis added). The weaponized library card, which anticipated the weapon of Wright’s own words in print, helped to promote a tantalizing prospect: the academic acculturation, the opportunity to catch the full spirit of Western civilization, offered by a move to Chicago. “Like other African Americans living in the South,” notes Mary Hricko, “Wright had an idealistic view that Chicago was a ‘dream-maker’ city.” Publisher and philanthropist Robert Abbott did much to cultivate and encourage this civic prospect among his fellow African Americans. “Abbott’s Chicago Defender perpetuated the myth that Chicago was a ‘Promised Land,’” as Hricko explains, “by publishing numerous stories and reports on the merits of the city and the opportunities one could gain

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by living there.” The Chicago Defender was significant in stimulating and maintaining the Great (Great Northward or Black) Migration. “Chicago’s literary dominance was also seductive to aspiring writers like Wright, who were well aware of the self-made success of African American journalists and writers.” In addition to Abbott, these authors included Claude Barnett, Katherine Dunham, Lorraine Hansberry, Fenton Johnson, Margaret Walker, Theodore Ward, and Frank Yerby. Even though the Harlem (or New Negro) Renaissance overshadowed the successes of its Midwestern complement, by the late 1920s, Chicago “was becoming a more popular venue for African American artists disillusioned with Harlem’s ‘New Negro’ movement” (99). “Wright arrived in Chicago during the winter of 1927,” documents Liesl Olson, “was stunned by the punishing blast of cold off the platform of the Illinois Central,” numbed to his bones, and soon disillusioned. “For him, Chicago was hardly the Promised Land but rather a kind of living hell” (22). In comparison, when visiting Lamb House in Rye, Kent, England, where Henry James lived from 1897 in splendid isolation behind an impregnable barricade of high walls, a setting in keeping with the rarified milieu delineated in the novels he wrote there—The Wings of a Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl—one might be tempted to scorn the American emigrant as a cosmopolite of Captain Sholto’s ilk. The fresh, lightly salted air from the English Channel was a distinct contrast to the muck-laden stench of the Chicago stockyards of which Upton Sinclair writes in The Jungle (1906), published within two years of The Golden Bowl. Wright was apprized of this smell on moving to the city. This awareness, which derived not only from his olfactory sense and his fondness (thanks in part to Mencken) for Sinclair’s work but also from his friendship with stockyard worker and fellow John Reed Club member Oscar Hunter, fed his nascent unease toward Abbott’s “Promised Land.”11 As Toru Kiuchi and Yoshinobu Hakutani relate, Wright started work as a dishwasher, but “later passed the written examination for postal service in the spring and began to work in summer 1928 as a temporary clerk in the post office for 65 cents an hour.” Disappointment soon intervened. That fall, “he […] failed the postal service medical examination required for a permanent position because of chronic undernourishment and lost a chance for a permanent position and returned to dishwashing.” Hereafter, Wright followed a strict diet “to increase his weight,” as Kiuchi and Hakutani report, “passed the next physical examination and was hired again in 1929 by the central post office at Clark Street and Jackson Boulevard as a substitute

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clerk and mail sorter” (32). This sorting facility, which was the largest in the world, occupied a fourteen-story building, and employed hundreds of clerks. “Apart from the pay,” as Rowley notes, “the redeeming feature was the company. The post office was a refuge for university students, white and black.” Here, “for the first time in his life, Wright made friends with white men” (61). One of his confrères beyond the sorting office was university sociologist Louis Wirth. “Whether it was at the instigation of Mary Wirth, his social worker, or whether he arranged it when Professor Louis Wirth came to speak at the John Reed Club,” writes Rowley, “Richard Wright made a visit to the University of Chicago” (81). Wirth, whose Jewish origins fostered a particular liking for minoritarian groups and cultures, took an immediate interest in Wright.12 “Wirth was happy to give Wright a reading list of undergraduate books on sociology” (82). Wright would tangentially revisit these events in The Outsider. “His head lolled as the trolley jolted through the snowy night streets,” relates the heterodiegetic narrator of Cross Damon. “His mind drifted back to the time he had been attending day classes at the University of Chicago, majoring in philosophy and working the night shift in the Post Office” (44). Of significance for the present study, Wirth apprized himself of Kantian philosophy and championed Kant’s dictums, especially when these pronouncements informed or corroborated Wirth’s own sociological conclusions. “It is in the nature of political society,” states Wirth in “Ideological Aspects of Social Disorganization” (1910), That every class, caste, institution, or other functional unit should have its own dogma and its individual life-program. In a familial society, dogma and ideology may perhaps be said to exist potentially and in the egg. They are not so likely to be stated formally as a rule or principle of action. Whereas the lawyer and the theologian, since ideologies are their main stock in trade, have dealt with them as solid realities, some sociologists have been inclined to consider them as irrelevant or as only of secondary importance. They have dismissed them as rationalizations of the reasons and have looked instead for the “real” motives of action which were supposed to be hidden behind the professed motives or pretexts. As a result they have perhaps failed to see that the ideologies may sometimes actually state the basic determining factors correctly, or at least that through the rationalizations the causes of conduct might be discovered. As Kant succinctly put it, “One should not believe everything people say, nor should one believe that they say it without reason.” (50–51)

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Wirth would underline this concluding point, using the same paraphrase from Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (1788), in the posthumously published “On Making Values Explicit” (1964). “Whether values are explicitly stated, or are inferred from what people say and do does not, of course, always give us reliable evidence on what values people actually hold” (159), he avers. As Kant put it, ‘One should not believe everything they say, nor should one believe that they say it without reason.’ People sometimes give ‘lip service’ to values without embracing them, because it is expected, because it is respectable, because it is noble or because it is safe or merely because it is fashionable. When they do so, they do not necessarily either have a comprehension of what it means to embrace certain values, nor do they necessarily give evidence of the fact that they are willing to sacrifice anything for these values. (159)

Wright, who had soon learned to believe neither everything that majoritarians said about racial status nor that they made these statements without self-interested reason, would have appreciated Wirth’s judgment. Of Wright’s Chicago years, argues George E. Kent, “the truth is probably that having caught a breath of life from the literature of revolt […] and from Marxian dialectics Wright was overimpressed with their efficiency as tools to explore the privacy and complexity of the black environment” (327). Eventually, Wright would become “aware that the Communists had no understanding of the depths of the lives of black men,” notes Kent. “But Marxism was the dynamic philosophy for social change. Where else was he to go?” (329). In offering both an appraisal of Richard Wright’s philosophy and an exposition of his attendant ideas, one must investigate, therefore, the philosophical strands that informed Karl Marx; and that investigation leads back to the Immanuel Kant in whom Wirth was versed. “Kant and Marx seem to operate in quite different registers,” as Pablo Gilabert observes. “One was a moralist, the other was hostile to moral talk; one was a critic of feudalism, the other a foe of capitalism; one challenged despotism and proposed a state with a republican structure, the other called for the dissolution of the state; one praised obedience, the other revolution” (553). Notwithstanding these differences, as Kain argues, “we can learn a good deal about Marx’s early ethical views by seeing the influence that Aristotle and Kant had on him” (277). This process reveals that Marx’s notions of universality and necessity, attributes that must attend the correct form of all laws, combine to form a principle similar to Kant’s categorical imperative. Both approaches stipulate unconditional rules of conduct

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that apply absolutely to all agents. Kant’s principle demands that agents act only in accordance with maxims that they can will to become universal laws, laws that agents must follow, whatever their individual or general circumstances. Concerning Rawls’s desired end of reflective equilibrium, “the publicity condition,” as he remarks, “is clearly implicit in Kant’s doctrine of the categorical imperative insofar as it requires us to act in accordance with principles that one would be willing as a rational being to enact as law for a kingdom of ends.” Indeed, Kant “thought of this kingdom as an ethical commonwealth, as it were, which has such moral principles for its public charter” (TJ 133). Petar Ramadanovic (106) identifies explicit evidence of Kant’s categorical imperative in a specific sentence from Wright’s Native Son that describes Bigger Thomas’s enlightenment: “He saw it all very sharply and simply: act like other people thought you ought to act, yet do what you wanted” (132; emphasis added). As Ramadanovic remarks, “what we see here is not that Bigger Thomas is a criminal who would ‘steal a dime, rape a woman, get drunk, or cut somebody,’ but that he wants to assault nothing less than the philosophical and moral foundation of the system.” Wright’s rewriting of Kant’s categorical imperative in this quotation from his most discussed novel exemplifies Thomas’s attempt, as Ramadanovic argues, “to radically reconfigure his social space—a necessarily tragic attempt to create new life. Bigger Thomas is indeed a violent criminal, but not a criminal who breaks the law; he is rather a criminal who—somewhat like the Marquis de Sade’s criminals in Jacques Lacan’s understanding (Ethics)—wants to blot out the entire symbolic order—i.e., the Law with a capital ‘L’” (106; emphasis added).13 Importantly, philosophical questions for Wright concerned not so much the imposition of majoritarian ethics onto minoritarians as the use of acceptable aspects of that ethical tradition to inform and transform that legacy. Before Wright could offer this reassessment, however, he needed some familiarity with Kantian philosophy, an awareness that he acquired while living in Chicago. Wright must have acquired this philosophical knowledge during this formative period—possibly via his association with Wirth—because that awareness soon presents itself in his formative published writings. In “Blueprint for Negro Writing: Two Definitions” (1937), Wright sets out a racial–aesthetic manifesto, his new definition of that credo necessarily and radically countering its established counterpart. “Even today,” he laments, “there are millions of American Negroes whose only sense of a whole universe, whose only relation to society and man,

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and whose only guide to personal dignity comes through the archaic morphology of Christian salvation” (99; emphasis added). The radical Wright demands to know whether “Negro writing be for the Negro masses, moulding the lives and consciousness of those masses toward new goals, or shall it continue begging the question of the Negroes’ humanity?” (99).14 “Wright broadly characterized Negro writing as an effort,” as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., explains, “to demonstrate the writer’s full humanity and equality with white human beings.” This attempt simultaneously criticized the Harlem Renaissance, because Wright felt that the New  York movement’s output arose from a dubious liaison between what in “Blueprint for Negro Writing” he terms “inferiority-complexed Negro ‘geniuses’ and burnt-out white Bohemians with money” (119). African-American writers ought to turn from this infertile coupling not only toward the multifarious traditions of black mythology but also toward the Western canons of literature and philosophy.15 To achieve this equilibrious aim, “Eliot, Stein, Joyce, Proust, Hemingway, and Anderson; Gorky, Barbusse, Nexo, and Jack London no less than the folklore of the Negro himself should form the heritage of the Negro writer. Every iota of gain in human thought and sensibility should be ready grist for his mill, no matter how farfetched they may seem in their immediate implications” (103). Wright would have immediately realized, however, that Kant’s Lectures on Physical Geography (1782) were fanciful at best, racist at worst. “Kant produced the most profound raciological thought of the eighteenth century” (704), believes Earl W. Count, but Pauline Kleingeld’s wide-ranging investigation into this aspect of Kant’s oeuvre offers a more sober perspective. “In the 1780s, the decade of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) and the Critique of Practical Reason (1788),” as Kleingeld traces, “Kant defended the view that there is a sexual and racial hierarchy that justifies the subjection of women to men and of non-whites to whites” (4). Furthermore, as Jonathan O. Chimakonam notes, “some scholars in the past, like Georg Hegel, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, and Emil Ludwig, have suggested the non-existence of logos among African peoples” (106), the non-existence, that is, of thinking, reasoning, and rationality. From the 1790s, however, Kant partially renounced his Lectures on Physical Geography, abandoning “his commitment to the racial hierarchy but not to the sexual hierarchy” (Kleingeld 4), and just as Wright would have realized the dubiousness of Kant’s lectures, so he surely appreciated,

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especially on reflection, that many of Kant’s other iotas of thought were profound at best, not farfetched at worst. No wonder, therefore, that art resulting from such philosophical musings should exhibit what Wright himself calls “a complex simplicity” (“Blueprint” 103; emphasis original). While this statement, as Fabre comments in The World of Richard Wright (1985), “is a way of claiming equal treatment for all in the field of literature” (69), Wright’s subsequent attempts to demonstrate the full humanity and essential equality of African Americans did not meet with an altogether favorable response from some of those contemporaries who were pursuing the same ends. Baldwin’s extended criticism of Native Son, which appeared in “Many Thousands Gone” (1951), constitutes the most sustained of these reactions. “The struggle which promised for a time to shape his work and give it purpose also fixed it in an ever more unrewarding rage,” states Baldwin. “Recording his days of anger he has also nevertheless recorded, as no Negro before him had ever done, that fantasy Americans hold in their minds when they speak of the Negro: that fantastic and fearful image which we have lived with since the first slave fell beneath the lash. This is the significance of Native Son and also, unhappily, its overwhelming limitation” (33–34). Baldwin agrees with Wright, “it is the question of Bigger’s humanity which is at stake, the relationship in which he stands to all other Americans—and, by implication, to all people”—but unfortunately, “it is precisely this question which [Native Son] cannot clarify, with which it cannot, in fact, come to any coherent terms” (41).16 Ramadanovic succinctly addresses Baldwin’s assessment. Wright’s “rewriting of Kant’s categorical imperative should have made Baldwin and other critics at least pause before accusing Native Son of social determinism” (106). Wright and his confrères, according to Baldwin in “Many Thousands Gone,” misrepresented Marxism: “their concept of a better world was quite helplessly American and betrayed a certain thinness of imagination” (33). This betrayal rankled the “Marxist Baldwin”—as Hedda Ben-Bassat describes him—the Baldwin who “want[ed] to change history” (134). By the time of composing Native Son, as a self-styled “Black Marxist” (Daniel Aaron 44), whose “writing was most directly influenced by the Party” (Cedric J. Robinson 292), a Communist influence on Wright was clearly visible, but underpinning this political tenor was a philosophical bedrock of significant depth. Wright’s political vision seemed thin to Baldwin, but Baldwin should have recognized the philosophical substance beneath Wright’s vision of humanity.

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“There are significant similarities between these important thinkers,” contends Gilabert of Kant and Marx; in particular, “both had a progressive view of history as the expansion of human freedom.” Just as Kant anticipated and informed Marx, so Kant anticipated and informed not only Wright but also Wright’s acceptance of Marx. While the majoritarians of the antebellum Southern States often justified slavery as necessary paternalism, Wright followed Kant and Marx in praising self-­determination and abhorring the paternalistic. Furthermore, both Kant and Marx, as Gilabert relates, “called for interpersonal and institutional arrangements in which people treated each other as ends and not merely as means” (553). To Baldwin, this call sounded hollow, but its double origin promotes and supports its actual importance. Marx himself valued Kant. “Marx views his own thought,” explains philosopher Allen W. Wood in Karl Marx (1981), “as heir to a definite philosophical tradition, or rather as combining two traditions: that of German idealist philosophy from Kant to Hegel in which he was educated, and that of Enlightenment materialism which he greatly admired” (xxxviii).17 This combination emphasizes at once Kant’s influence on Marx and that Marx is no simple Kantian. Marx uses aspects of Kantian thought for his own purposes. Crucially for a discussion of Richard Wright, Kantian dignity, the imperative by which people must treat each other as ends, is one of those aspects, and “dignity (for example man as example of a finite and reasonable being), that unconditional dignity (Würdigkeit) that Kant placed higher, precisely [justement], than any economy, any compared or comparable value, any market price (Marktpreis)” (xx; emphasis original), as Jacques Derrida avers in the “Exordium” to Specters of Marx (1994), is an-economic. This systemic preeminence, which may account for Baldwin’s myopia concerning Wright’s philosophical perspective, comes to the fore in Kant’s later writings on politics and the philosophy of history: “historical development of culture and social institutions,” as Kain relates, has become in Kant’s thoughts “a necessary presupposition for the possibility of morality—for the possibility of action in accordance with the categorical imperative” (277). Similarly, what interests Marx fundamentally is the realization of morality in society, an interest in which one “see[s] even more clearly the influence of Kant” (278): for Marx, “moral evil is the outcome of a state of affairs in which an empirical existent is shut off from and cannot correspond to its essence” (279).

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Marx terms this failure alienation. “Moral good,” states Kain, “is the result of existence conforming to essence” (279). Yet, without a proletarian revolution, explains S. M. Love, “the fact that workers are alienated from their work in a capitalist system is merely an unfortunate reality on Marx’s picture. While we may want to change it, we have no obligation to” (589). Thus, as Wood concludes, “Marx’s deepest attitude toward capitalism is the same as that of Rousseau, Kant and Fichte toward the civilized condition—it is one of profound ambivalence” (KM xxiii; emphasis original). A similar equivocation—Ben-Bassat describes Baldwin’s philosophical attitude toward alienation as “schizophrenic” (120), divided between the Christian theology of Marcion, on the one hand, and the atheistic political economy of Marx, on the other—shapes Baldwin’s attitude toward Wright. Gilabert agrees with Wood concerning Marx’s profound ambivalence toward capitalism: “Marx in fact criticized conceptions that mischaracterize non-instrumental support for fellow human beings as involving ‘humiliation’ and ‘an offence against the dignity of man’ while condoning their treatment as commodities as ‘the justified, self-confident and self-­ acknowledged dignity of man incarnate’” (571–72; emphasis original). Wood further remarks how “we […] miss a crucial part of Marx’s message if we ignore his praise for the awesome achievements of the bourgeoisie in erecting the capitalist social order. The first part of the Communist Manifesto is above all a paean of praise to these achievements” (KM xxiv). Ironically, then, the foremost accomplishment of capitalism, according to Marx, is the intellectual realization of the monstrousness and intolerableness of a classridden society. In this sense, Marx echoes Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as Wood observes: “what civilization does for us above all is provide us with the capacity to see clearly the evils of civilization” (KM xxiv). For Marx, as Gilabert maintains, “much of our normative thinking should thus be focused on figuring out how to frame our reaction to our social and material circumstances” (563), and “when labor is treated merely as a means to satisfy needs external to it,” as Nicholas Churchich maintains, “human beings cannot realize their true nature and essential powers.” From Marx’s perspective, “man can never be truly human in his productive activity” under capitalism. “Because working people are treated by their greedy employers as mere means rather than what Kant calls ‘ends in themselves,’ and their lives depend almost entirely on the ‘whim of the rich,’ this leads inevitably to their degradation, loss of dignity, and ‘active alienation’” (109). Significantly, Kant’s works on history, politics, and law

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did not ignore the human reaction to social and material circumstances, and “the Kantian framework,” as Love avers, “offers a way to further develop [Marx’s] critique of capital” (589). While “Kant does not have much to say about the relationship between capitalist employers and waged workers” (564), concedes Gilabert, he recognizes (as Marx does) “that many problems are to be addressed first as a matter of how the structure of a society is organized rather than as a matter of the adoption of good attitudes by isolated individuals” (564–65). This first issue is not so much, “how should one live?” (“PE” 245; emphasis added), as Nussbaum asks, not so much about the ethical relevance of particularity, as Nussbaum hopes. “It is not that interpersonal instances of instrumental or telic treatment are not important,” explains Gilabert. “It is, rather, that there are structural instances of those kinds of treatment, and the forms of social relations they involve should be given pride of place in social critique and change because of their enormous symbolic and causal significance” (565; emphasis original). Kant sets out this distinction in The Metaphysics of Morals. “Having the resources to practice such beneficence as depends on the goods of fortune is, for the most part,” he argues, “a result of certain beings being favored through the injustice of the government, which introduces an inequality of wealth that makes others need their beneficence. Under such circumstances, does a rich man’s help to the needy, on which he so readily prides himself as something meritorious, really deserve to be called beneficence at all?” (573).18 Kant might proffer little about the relationship between capitalists and their workers, but he censures servitude, insisting that contractual obligations vouchsafe the injustice of this condition. This injustice explodes the conception of such a structure; any contractual servitude is self-contradictory: Servants are included in what belongs to the head of a household, and, as far as the form (the way of his being in possession) is concerned, they are his by a right that is like a right to a thing; for if they run away from him he can bring them back in his control by his unilateral choice. But as far as the matter is concerned, that is, what use he can make of these members of his household, he can never behave as if he owned them (dominus servi); for it is only by a contract that he has brought them under his control, and a contract by which one party would completely renounce its freedom for the other’s advantage would be self-contradictory, that is, null and void, since by it one

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party would cease to be a person and so would have no duty to keep the contract but would recognize only force. (MM 431; emphasis original)

At the root of this self-contradiction is the affront that is slavery. “Whoever is another’s tool (which he can become only by a verdict and right) is a bondsman (servus in sensu stricto) and is the property (dominium) of another, who is accordingly not merely his master (herus) but also his owner (dominus) and can therefore,” as Kant reasons, “alienate him as a thing, use him as he pleases” (MM 471; emphasis original). In short, “the master is authorized to use the powers of his subject as he pleases, he can also exhaust them until his subject dies or is driven to despair (as with the Negroes on the Sugar Islands)” (MM 472). The echoes of that despair reverberate down the ages, as the authorization granted by philosophically grounded literature can illustrate: Wright’s The Outsider and Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man (1952), adjudges Granville Hick in writing of “Liberalism in the Fifties” (1956), “express a profound sense of alienation” (288); so too does Baldwin’s Another Country (1962). “Philosophic texts, if products of social groups doggedly fighting to survive,” as Leonard Harris memorably asserts, “are texts born of struggle” (ix). Joel Levin and Banks McDowell illustrate Kant’s reasoning about paternalism with reference to Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. “Paternalistic contracts, those created in the best interests of the obligor but without his consent, fall below the voluntariness threshold,” they note. “One well-­ known example of a paternalistic contract would be that endorsed by John Rawls in creating a just society. There, fairness is (arguendo) achieved—as all prejudice, special pleading, loyalty, and situational foresight are eliminated—but at the cost of denying the obligor the choice of selecting bargaining conditions, and even whether or not to bargain at all” (48–49). This denial is a denial of Kantian dignity. Yet, while “the idea of human dignity is the heart of his moral outlook, and he claimed that every human being has equal dignity,” as Gilabert concludes in drawing on Wood’s Kantian Ethics (2008) (194–95, 323–24 n5), “Kant did not identify all the radical implications of this idea for the shaping of social institutions and practices” (562). The Marx on whom Wright drew does pinpoint some of these repercussions. Just as slavery is an affront to Kant’s dignitarian ideals, so Marx appreciates that capitalism affronts those ideals by enshrining the instrumental treatment of others within the system of production and exchange. That consecration survives the abolishment of slavery and servitude. “It

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could be objected that capitalist exploitation involves no dignitarian injustice,” observes Gilabert, “because workers freely consent to the terms on which they interact with capitalists,” but “consent that is given in circumstances of profound vulnerability and power asymmetry does not authorize its outcomes.” The law ought to forbid lowering the voluntariness threshold in such circumstances. “Because of the deep background inequality of power resulting from their structural position in a capitalist economy,” laments Gilabert, “workers accept a pattern of economic transaction in which they submit to the direction of capitalists during the activities of production and surrender a disproportional part of their fruits” (566). One author who shares this lament, an author who appreciates how this structural expression of instrumental treatment circumscribed and directed the postbellum life of most individual African Americans, is Richard Wright.

Notes 1. Love’s Knowledge is cited parenthetically hereafter as LK. 2. “Kant’s ethical thought is perhaps,” opines Allen W. Wood, “both the finest and the most characteristic product of the Enlightenment” ([1999] 1). 3. On What Matters (2011–17), Parfit’s second, final, and most important major work, appeared in three volumes some thirty years after the publication of Reasons and Persons. “His magnum opus,” remarks Katrien Schaubroeck, “was long-awaited” (107). “On What Matters,” in Husain Sarkar’s judgment, “is a masterpiece. In this massive, profound, and powerful book—actually, says Parfit, it is several books rolled into one—Parfit offers in [three] large volumes innumerable fresh, deep, and systematic arguments, arguments that are as complex as they are lucid and learned, probing and meticulous, with hordes of intriguing examples and counterexamples, that constitute his moral theory; it is a veritable tour de force” (x). 4. On What Matters is cited parenthetically hereafter as OWM. 5. In fairness to Meissner, other commentators link Mrs. Newsome with a philosophical stance—Julie Rivkin writes of the logic of delegation, Merle A. Williams addresses the phenomenological epoche, and Richard A. Hocks considers moral absolutism versus pragmatism—but they do so either briefly or implicitly. 6. Poetic Justice is cited parenthetically hereafter as PJ. 7. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari introduced the concepts of “major” and “minor” literature during their detailed discussion of Franz Kafka’s oeuvre. “A minor literature,” they explain, “doesn’t come from a minor language;

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it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language” (16). Initially deferring to Deleuze and Guattari, but developing their concepts for specific needs, the present study employs the terms majoritarian, minoritarian, and their derivatives. Majoritarians, whether or not the most populous group in a social formation, regulate official discourses and control repressive state forces, thereby maintaining socioeconomic authority. Although this power at once targets and marginalizes minoritarians as others, the environing social, economic, and political coordinates of majoritarianism have psychopathological consequences for both societal groups. This outfall cannot help but find literary expression. The canon of minor American literature, therefore, includes the works of not only African Americans, Jewish Americans, and tribal Americans but also majoritarian authors operating with a minoritarian sensibility. 8. “I’ve been to England, France and Mexico, but I don’t know how people live ten blocks from me,” Mary tells Bigger. “We know so little about each other” (70). 9. “Richard Wright’s First Hundred Books” is cited parenthetically hereafter as “FHB.” 10. “Wright’s vivid account” in Black Boy “of his discovery of the joys and importance of fiction through the initiation of Mencken’s Prejudices and Book of Prefaces in Memphis is accurate,” believes Fabre. “A Book of Prefaces certainly served as his literary Bible for years, introducing him to Dreiser and Conrad, to the French and British realists, to J.  G. Huneker, Hauptmann, and Suderman, among others. Yet Wright only owned A Book of Prefaces (in the 1927 edition), and he borrowed Prejudices from the New York Public Library when he wanted to refresh his memories of it for the writing of Black Boy” (“FHB” 60–61). 11. “The John Reed Club,” explains Rowley, “was a national organization of proletarian artists and writers” (75). Andrew Weinstein describes the John Reed Club less euphemistically as “a Communist Party organ in the United States named after the American journalist who had covered the Russian Revolution in Ten Days That Shook the World (1919)” (143). By 1927, “there were thirty clubs dotted across the country,” as Rowley documents, “and the Chicago club had around one hundred members” (75). 12. Wirth was “an expert on the urban enclaves of Jewish communities” (Gene Andrew Jarrett 87). 13. Ramadanovic’s reference is to Lacan’s The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1986). 14. One assumes that Wright means “posing” rather than “begging.” 15. The Africanization of ethics conducted by philosophers led by Peter Bodunrin, Paulin Hountondji, Lansana Keita, Valentin Mudimbe, Odera Oruka, and Kwasi Wiredu promotes “the argument that philosophy is a critical activity and, therefore, a rational discourse,” as Philip Higgs relates.

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“In these pronouncements, however, these professional African philosophers identify themselves with the Enlightenment tradition, represented by thinkers such as Hobbes, Descartes, Rousseau, Locke, and Kant, who all maintained that reason is a natural human endowment, which when directed properly can discover certain universal truths” (768). 16. “Many Thousands Gone” is cited parenthetically hereafter as “MTG.” 17. Karl Marx is cited parenthetically hereafter as KM. 18. The Metaphysics of Morals is cited parenthetically hereafter as MM.

CHAPTER 3

Philosophical Literature

When the flood waters recede, the poor folk along the river start from scratch. —Richard Wright, “Silt,” 19; emphasis original

Richard Nathaniel Wright was born on 4 September 1908; his parents Ella (née Wilson) and Nathan were sharecroppers, who lived in Natchez, Mississippi; and Wright’s rudimentary short story “Silt,” which New Masses published on 24 August 1937, draws on both his early childhood and his parent’s history to underpin its realist credentials.1 “Ella and Nathan worked hard,” relates Debbie Levy. “But sharecropping was full of pitfalls. Sharecroppers had to get loans from merchants to buy seed and tools. In exchange for the loans, the sharecroppers pledged portions of their harvest to the merchants. They also turned over part of their harvest to the landowners, as rent for living on the farm” (14–15). In consequence, and especially when seasons were harsh and harvests were poor, Ella and Nathan struggled, as did their fellow sharecroppers. Earlier in the year of Richard’s birth, Natchez had endured over four months of inundation. “The flood in the lower Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers, which commenced in February, and reached its maximum June 19 and 22,” as the Cleveland Abbes report in “Rivers and Floods” for Monthly Weather

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Wainwright, Kantian Dignity and Trolley Problems in the Literature of Richard Wright, American Literature Readings in the 21st Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40216-6_3

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Review (July 1908), “exceeded all previous records for duration of high water” (201). The Wrights were not one of the rare exceptions to the structural imperative that circumscribed and directed the postbellum life of the majority of African Americans. Indeed, beneath the original scratch to which the epigraph from “Silt” that heads this chapter refers, the original tilling and farming with which sharecroppers like Ella and Nathan had begun, is what their son understands as a deeper economic baseline. As “Silt” lays bare, when the inundation recedes, the postdiluvian soil is richer; “the flood waters had been more than eight feet high,” such that “every tree, blade of grass, and stray stick had its flood-mark: caky, yellow mud” (19); landowners will become richer; but sharecroppers, as the clogging mud that impedes protagonist Tom’s every postdiluvian stride connotes, will sink further into penury: A mud-caked buggy rolled up. The shaggy horse was splattered all over. Burgess leaned his white face out of the buggy and spat. “Well, I see you’re back.” “Yessuh.” “How things look?” “They don look so good, Mistah.” “What seems to be the trouble?” “Waal, Ah ain got no hoss, no grub, nothing … The only thing Ah is got is tha ol cow there …” “You owe eight hundred dollahs down at the store, Tom.” “Yessuh, Ah know. But, Mistah Burgess, can’t yuh knock somethin off of tha, seein as how Ahm down n out now?” “You ate that grub, and I got to pay for it, Tom.” “Yessuh, Ah know.” […] “Get in the buggy and come with me. I’ll stake you with grub. We can talk over how you can pay it back.” (20)

This sort of socioeconomic impediment was no less stark for the African Americans of the Mississippi River in 1927, at the time of the next catastrophic inundation, than it had been in 1908. “When black sharecroppers returned to their homes,” as William Howard chronicles, “they were materially worse off than before: what few possessions they had owned were washed away, and to start over required borrowing from their landlords and going further into debt” (52).

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Immanuel Kant’s notion of innate equality informs an understanding of what is morally wrong here. “Freedom (independence from being constrained by another’s choice), insofar as it can coexist with the freedom of every other in accordance with a universal law,” asserts Kant, “is the only original right belonging to every human being by virtue of his humanity” (MM 393). This principle assumes the presence of “innate equality, that is, independence from being bound by others to more than one can in turn bind them; hence a human being’s quality of being his own master (sui iuris), as well as being a human being beyond reproach (iusti)” (MM 393–94; emphasis original). To all intents and purposes, however, Burgess in Wright’s “Silt” remains more of an antebellum “Master” than a postbellum “Mistah.” For Karl Marx, as Pablo Gilabert explains, “dignitarian norms are violated when workers are avoidably cornered in capitalism into work that is repetitive, stunting, toxically competitive or that engages little initiative and decision-making” (568). In “Silt,” the postdiluvian soil might be richer, more fecund than before the flood, but Tom is trapped in an economic system that, under the almost unchallengeable auspices of landowners, effectively pits sharecropper against sharecropper. “It’s going to be a little tough, Tom,” counsels Burgess. “But you got to go through with it. Two of the boys tried to run away this morning and dodge their debts, and I had to have the sheriff pick em up” (20). While the individual capacity for self-direction is almost totally circumscribed by capitalist demands, the collective capacity for cooperation is insufficiently respected too; dominated and exploited, sharecroppers are treated as means rather than ends. Louis Wirth, that early influence on Wright beyond the sorting office of his daily work in Chicago, understood something of the mutual competitiveness and mutual interdependence of the minoritarian situation, and passed on this appreciation of human economics to his colleagues, students, and friends. Furthermore, in formally presenting this understanding in an essay on “World Community, World Society, and World Government: An Attempt at a Clarification of Terms” (1948), Wirth would again draw on Kant: The bonds that bind the individual organisms and varieties of plant and animal organisms together are the functional interrelationships which are essentially competitive. When we talk about the ‘law of the jungle,’ we mean the war of each against all. This state of existence, if it can at all be called

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social, rests on what Kant has called man’s ‘unsocial sociability,’ that is to say, upon a set of conditions under which each organism strives to achieve its own ends and only inadvertently confers some benefit upon other organisms, but through this inadvertent by-product of its own selfish striving creates ties of mutual interdependence with others. Such a condition of interdependence does not call for either awareness, communication, or the existence of or agreement on norms. (322)

In contrast to the demands of capitalism, Kantian philosophy affirms not only the libertarian rights of both individuals and collectives but also individual and collective duties toward both the freedom and the well-­ being of others. These subtleties ensure that Kant’s dignitarian imperative escapes the scorn Marx directed toward the “Robinsonades” of political theory—supposed utopians who worship the self-sufficient economy enacted by the castaway in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719).2 Along lines relatable to Kantian philosophy, Wright’s early writings dramatize, to appropriate Richard Yarborough, “the struggle of blacks to accommodate themselves to constant injustice and humiliation while maintaining a modicum of personal dignity” (xxiv); and that maintenance, cast in terms of racial politics, recognizes a deontological as well as an expectational side to Kant’s dignitarian imperative.3 What is more, Wright’s early works meet the remedial conditions to Martha C. Nussbaum’s unresolved dilemma in “Perceptive Equilibrium” in trying to conciliate literary theory and ethical theory. His texts provide hospitable literature from a minoritarian author whose minoritarian protagonists face severe sociopolitical challenges, minoritarian protagonists whose responses to moral choices often combine the reflective and the perceptive (as, separately but in sum, Mrs. Newsome and Lewis Lambert Strether do in Nussbaum’s textual choice for “Perceptive Equilibrium,” Henry James’s rarified The Ambassadors), yet whose moral choices insist that reflection dominates (or even silences) perception. “Silt” is too rudimentary to bear such interpretational density, but within twelve months of this short story appearing in New Masses, Wright published an appropriable text, a work that meets all three remedial conditions in characterizing the dignitarian imperative: his first book, Uncle Tom’s Children. In May 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and soon thereafter, that organization set up various Writers Projects, which supported struggling authors through the Great Depression (1929–39). “In 1935,” as Liesl Olson reports,

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“Wright was one of the first to be hired” (23) by the WPA’s Illinois Writers Project (IWP), and in the autumn of 1937, he entered the WPA short story competition. This contest “was open to all WPA members,” as Addison Gayle documents, and Wright “knew that he would face stiff competition. Some of the soon-to-be-best writers in America, both black and white, among them Claude McKay and John Cheever, were members of the WPA.” Ever thoughtful, Wright “vacillated almost till the last moment, finally beating the deadline, to submit the four stories that constitute Uncle Tom’s Children. The judges for the contest were Harry Scherman, president of the Book-of-the-Month Club; Sinclair Lewis, the novelist; and Lewis Gannett, the critic. Shortly before Christmas, he was informed that he had won first prize, five hundred dollars” (105–6). “Uncle Tom’s Children appeared in the spring of 1938,” as Yarborough chronicles, “and created an immediate sensation” (xx). As its title intimates, Wright’s book is a descendent of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly (1852), and the epigraph for his volume—“The post Civil War household word among Negroes—‘He’s an Uncle Tom!’—which denoted reluctant toleration for the cringing type who knew his place before white folk, has been supplanted by a new word from another generation which says:—‘Uncle Tom is dead!’”—supports this intimation. Although Wright’s “interpretation of the epithet ‘Uncle Tom’ is not intended to be faithful to the famous character from the Stowe novel,” Stowe’s eponymous protagonist, as Tommie Shelby argues, “may possess some of the vices that Wright is concerned to expose” (517), foibles, weaknesses, and failings such as passiveness, submissiveness, and subservience. Another related, though more ambiguous, attribute under Wright’s consideration is humility. “The Western bourgeoisie, though fundamentally racist, most often manages to mask this racism by a multiplicity of nuances,” argues Frantz Fanon (1925–61) in The Wretched of the Earth (1963), “which allow it to preserve intact its proclamation of mankind’s outstanding dignity” (163).4 This proclamation plays humility from both sides simultaneously: eschewing the moral requirements of that quality, while demanding that quality of the racially abused. “Humility,” expounds Henry Sidgwick in The Methods of Ethics, “does not so much consist in controlling this desire,” this wish for the admiration of others, “as in repressing the claim for its satisfaction which we are naturally disposed to make upon others. We are inclined to demand from others ‘tokens of respect,’ some external symbol of their recognition of our elevated place

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in the scale of human beings; and to complain if our demands are not granted” (336).5 Humility ought to temper such claims and demands. Humility asks for self-suppression. “It is thought to be our duty not to exact, in many cases, even the expression of reverence which others are strictly bound to pay,” notes Sidgwick; but racism ignores this deontic invitation, and this sort of deliberate oversight invokes Sidgwick’s final thoughts on the matter. “And yet here, again, there is a limit, in the view of Common Sense, at which this quality of behaviour passes over into a fault: for the omission of marks of respect is sometimes an insult which impulses commonly regarded as legitimate and even virtuous (sense of Dignity, Self-respect, Proper Pride, etc.) prompt us to repel.” Sidgwick does not “think it possible to claim a consensus for any formula for determining this limit” (ME 336; emphasis original), but faults, omissions, and denials that lie well outside any such threshold do exist—as victims of prejudice can attest. The holders and purveyors of racism do not recognize their own views as obsessional neuroses (let alone seek psychoanalytical treatment for holding and purveying them). Racists do not accept that their prejudices manifest a mental aberration. Nonetheless, a relationship holds in psychoanalysis between racists and people who indulge in a particular phantasy, one Sigmund Freud titularly names in “‘A Child is Being Beaten.’ A Contribution to the Study of the Origin of Sexual Perversion” (1919). In this sense, to appropriate Freud’s analysis, “very probably there are still more frequent instances” of this kind of disturbing phantasy “among the far greater number of people who have not been obliged to come to analysis by manifest illness” (179).6 A seemingly instinctive pleasure impels beating and racist perversions alike: “the phantasy has feelings of pleasure attached to it,” explains Freud, “and on their account the patient has reproduced it on innumerable occasions in the past or may even still be doing so”; and this imaginary creation almost invariably leads to either “a masturbatory gratification” or some form of onanistic substitute. Concerted study allowed Freud “to establish that the first phantasies of the kind were entertained very early in life: certainly before school age, and not later than in the fifth or sixth year.” Racist phantasies find sustenance at this stage of development too. “When the child was at school and saw other children being beaten by the teacher”—or witnessed, to emend Freud’s account, members of one race being beaten by members of another race, “then, if the phantasies had become dormant, this experience called them up again, or, if they were

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still present, it reinforced them.” Thereafter, the phantasies continued to develop, and Freud’s patients would testify to “an indefinite number” of subjects “being beaten” (“CBB” 179). At higher levels of schooling, where teachers abstained from administering corporal punishment, “the influence of such occasions was replaced and more than replaced,” as Freud reports, “by the effects of reading” (“CBB” 180; emphasis added). Significantly for a study of Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children, Freud then reveals that in his “patients’ milieu,” which was generally majoritarian, “it was almost always the same books whose contents gave a new stimulus to the beating-phantasies.” These volumes comprised, on the one hand, “what was known as the ‘Bibliothèque rose,’” being a collection of stories dedicated entirely to childhood heroes, and on the other hand, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (“CBB” 180), being a forerunner, however estranged, of Uncle Tom’s Children. One incident from Stowe’s novel portrays what is (in effect) a racially mediated instance of Freud’s findings. The “snowy” white pony belonging to Eva “was now brought up to the back verandah by Tom, while a little mulatto boy of about thirteen led along a small black Arabian, which had just been imported, at a great expense, for Henrique,” Eva’s cousin (70–71). Dodo “was a handsome, bright-eyed mulatto, of just Henrique’s size,” who unsuccessfully attempts to explain that he has rubbed down Henrique’s stallion, despite the horse’s dusty appearance. Violence erupts. “Henrique struck him across the face with his riding-whip, and, seizing one of his arms, forced him on to his knees, and beat him till he was out of breath” (71). Eva complains of Dodo’s treatment; Henrique apologizes; but his less than contrite contrition, which holds (rather than relinquishes) the prospect of beatings for Dodo and associated frissons for Henrique, is morally intolerable: “a few cuts never come amiss with Dodo,—he’s a regular spirit, I can tell you; but I won’t beat him again before you” (72). In response to such textual stimulation, according to Freud’s psychoanalytical tracings, “the child began to compete with these works of fiction by producing its own phantasies and by constructing a wealth of situations, and even whole institutions, in which children were beaten or were punished and disciplined in some other way, because of their naughtiness and bad behaviour” (“CBB” 180). By analogy, in the racialized environment of Wright’s America, white children were free to imagine the beating of black children, punishment predicated on constructions of racial difference. Ironically, the ultimate consequence of such imaginative freedom, a

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response to a wealth of ethically impoverished situations and deeply institutionalized racisms, was the promotion of African-American resistance.7 According to Freud, “the experience of real scenes of beating at school produced in the child who witnessed them a peculiarly excited feeling which was probably of a mixed character and in which repugnance had a large share. In a few cases the real experience of the scenes of beating was felt to be intolerable” (“CBB” 180). Eva’s response to Henrique’s beating of Dodo illustrates this feeling. Psychoanalytically significant aspects of overwriting the popularity of Uncle Tom’s Cabin with the ethical worth of Uncle Tom’s Children involve, therefore, the dampening of any perverse excitement in its reception, an implicit endeavor that aims for the collapse of perceptive and reflective instances of readerly prejudice. Unlike the reading experience associated with Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the reading experience associated with Uncle Tom’s Children ought to offer no onanistic gratification, and because the fixations of racism are the preternatural result of circumambient inculcation, Wright’s ethical offering does not rely on natural expectations but seeks to impose an obligation. The commercial success of Uncle Tom’s Children “was underscored by Harper’s publication of an expanded edition of the book in 1940” (Yarborough xx–xxi). In addition to the four original stories, “Big Boy Leaves Home,” “Down by the Riverside,” “Long Black Song,” and “Fire and Cloud,” this new edition included the autobiographical sketch, “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” which American Stuff had published in 1936, and “Bright and Morning Star,” which had appeared separately in New Masses in 1938. With this expansion, the longer book falls into two parts: the autobiographical sketch and the first three original stories comprise the opening section; “Fire and Cloud” and “Bright and Morning Star” comprise the shorter second section.8 Shelby’s observations in “The Ethics of Uncle Tom’s Children” are useful in anticipating, but in no way exhaust, Wright’s book as an appropriate vehicle for addressing Nussbaum’s conciliatory dilemma. Moreover, another early influence on Wright’s ethical thinking, but one that Shelby overlooks, was American psychoanalyst and psychologist Trigant Burrow (1875–1950), most especially Burrow’s The Social Basis of Consciousness: A Study in Organic Psychology Based upon a Synthetic and Societal Concept of the Neuroses (1927). Indeed, as Howard relates, Wright “was particularly struck by an incident cited in the book, in which a woman dived into Lake Geneva to save a complete stranger” (48). Writing of “the organic instinct

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of race unity” (127), and wishing to emphasize the “blindly impulsive character of this instinct” (127), Burrow recalls: I was standing with a lady on the shore of Lake Zürich. A sudden storm arose and we could see plainly that two young men in a sail-boat well out in the middle of the lake had lost complete control of their craft. To the crowd that had gathered on the quays it was evident from the way the sail was jibing from side to side that the boat would overturn. A number of launches began hurrying toward it. As the boat capsized, throwing the men into the lake, my companion, suddenly tearing off her gloves, dashed toward the water. I managed to seize her just as she reached the water’s edge. On my rallying her and inquiring just what might be her plans with reference to two men a full quarter of a mile out in the lake and closely surrounded by competent rescue parties, she was unable to account for her impulsive reaction beyond declaring that she “just couldn’t let them drown like that!” Here was an individual with as goodly a share of unconscious egotism as the rest of us, but in whom at the sight of danger to others the self-instinct was completely subordinated to the organic behests of our common societal instinct. (127n1)

Wirth’s reference in “World Community, World Society, and World Government” to “ties of mutual interdependence” (322) resonates with Burrow’s reference in The Social Basis of Consciousness to “common societal instinct” (127n). Burrow’s conclusion is, however, more optimistic than Wirth’s inference is, and in “How Uncle Tom’s Children Grew” (1938), which he penned shortly after Harper’s published his first book, Wright recognizes these sociological reverberations, siding with Burrow in citing the Lake Zürich incident. Wright concentrates on Burrow’s interest in consciousness, noting that Burrow “pointed out” how this incident “showed that social consciousness, the desire to save and serve others, is more powerful than one’s own sense of self-preservation.” To Wright, the possibility that an appreciation of mutual interdependence could overcome the promptings of self-­interest was a revelation, “the spark,” as he testifies, “that set going a whole train of thought” (15). This inspirational flash satisfied the deontological side of the dignitarian imperative, and African-American writer and philosopher Alain Locke shared his contemporary’s insight: “our novelists must learn to master the medium before attacking the heavier themes,” he writes in “The Negro: ‘New’ or Newer Negro: A Retrospective Review of the Literature of the Negro for 1938” (1939); “a smaller canvas dimensionally

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done is better than a thin epic or a melodramatic saga” (337). Wright satisfies this demand with the moderately sized canvas of Uncle Tom’s Children. This book “is a well-merited literary launching for what must be watched as a major literary career” (337), enthuses Locke: “with this, our Negro fiction of social interpretation comes of age” (338).9 Locke appreciates how Uncle Tom’s Children documents the minor inconveniences that illicit major difficulties. “The force of Wright’s versions of Negro tragedy in the South lies in the correct reading of the trivialities that in that hate-charged atmosphere precipitate […] frightful climaxes of death and persecution” (337). Less trivial, however, is the alienation of African Americans, and Wright’s work firmly grasps this phenomenon too. Alienation, interpreted by Marx from the Kantian perspective of an agent being shut off from, and unable to correspond to, his or her own essence, fuels tragedy; and Wright’s philosophical insights into this condition drew withal on the thoughts of literary theorist and philosopher Kenneth Burke. Wright’s “debt towards Kenneth Burke, whom he admired and whose Permanence and Change he bought in 1935,” observes Michel Fabre, “is still unrecorded as far as his literary philosophy is concerned” (“FHB” 472). Put succinctly, “at the roots of the ethical,” as Burke avers in Permanence and Change (1935) and as Wright illustrates in Uncle Tom’s Children, “there is tragedy” (195). Mainstream critic Malcolm Cowley, who would be prominent in promoting William Faulkner and earning Wright’s majoritarian coeval from Mississippi the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature, provides an appraisal in New Republic (6 April 1938) of Uncle Tom’s Children that complements Locke’s judgment: “I found these stories both heartening, as evidence of a vigorous new talent, and terrifying as the expression of a racial hatred that has never ceased to grow and gets no chance to die” (280). In sum, as Yarborough concludes, “Uncle Tom’s Children marked the beginning of what might be termed modern black ‘protest’ literature,” offering “the most unrelenting and rage-fueled critique of white racism ever to surface in fiction written by blacks directed toward a mainstream American readership” (xii). “Building upon this real but partial acceptance into the literary community,” as Edwin Berry Burgum observes in “The Promise of Democracy and the Fiction of Richard Wright” (1943), “minority peoples now for the first time could express their awareness of the meaning of democracy and of the dignity of their share in it.” Yet, as Burgum adds, “they could not fail to be acutely conscious of the partial character of their attainment”

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(340).10 In “The Curse of Prejudice” (1931), while praising the communal spirit of African Americans, the otherwise sympathetic H. L. Mencken at once highlights this incompleteness and expresses the need for resignation. He prefers minoritarians to “face the music without protesting too much” (126). Of German descent, Mencken classes himself as minoritarian—“I can testify on this point” (125–26)—and believes that those German Americans who had vehemently criticized President Woodrow Wilson’s declaration of war against the Central Powers “are now held in contempt by both Anglo-Saxon Americans and their own people” (126). Mencken thinks that this sort of contempt also targets militant African Americans: “they will find certain white doors closed to them to the end of time” (125). According to Mencken, only the “shrewder among them have taken in this fact, and proceeded to make the best of it,” these clearer minds accepting “that the intelligent thing for Negroes to do is not to try to edge nearer and nearer to the whites, but to admit and glory in their Negroism.” For Mencken, who effectively touches on the Kantian, “this seems […] to be a sound position,” which “will probably bring them far nearer to equal rights and dignities, in the long run, than the effort of other leaders to obtain for them the complete equality that they can never really get” (125). As Charles Scruggs summarizes, Mencken held that “injustice had forged the [African American] in iron, and although some of his leaders protested ‘too much,’ for the most part he had learned how to survive with dignity” (33). In fact, the seemingly never-ending distance involved in reaching equal rights and dignities would be unintentionally highlighted twenty-five years later by Faulkner, whose “Interview with Russell Howe” (4 March 1956) would contain a notorious piece of advice from the Nobel laureate to African Americans: they would be wise to “Go slow” (258). Unquestioned African-American dignity remained a distant goal. As Michel Fabre relates, Irish-American writer Jack Conroy, whom Mencken favored as an author, befriended Wright, “and when it was published in 1934, Wright was impressed by The Disinherited,” which heralded the worker-writer tradition of infusing serious literature with vernacular storytelling and working-class experiences. “In a 1935 term paper that he wrote for his friend Esse Lee Ward,” as Fabre notes, “Wright alluded to ‘the new degree of persuasion that can be seen in such work as The Modern Temper by Joseph Wood Krutch and Jack Conroy’s The Disinherited’” (“FHB” 463–64). As Wright concludes, “Crane’s Maggie, A Girl of the Streets is

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simply a coldly materialistic picture of poverty, while Jack Conroy’s The Disinherited is the picture of men and women groping their way to a new concept of human dignity” (qtd. in “FHB” 464n9). The partial character of dignitarian attainment by African Americans in Uncle Tom’s Children expresses this groping, and this expression, realistic yet tragic, ensured that not all of Locke’s black contemporaries shared his enthusiasm for Wright’s publication. “This book is about hatreds,” railed Zora Neale Hurston in Saturday Review of Literature (2 April 1938). “Mr. Wright serves notice by his title that he speaks of people in revolt, and his stories are so grim that the Dismal Swamp of race hatred must be where they live. Not one act of understanding and sympathy comes to pass in the entire work.” What is worse, “all the characters in this book,” of whatever ethnicity, “are elemental and brutish” (32). In reading Uncle Tom’s Children, “the reader sees the picture of the South that the communists have been passing around of late. A dismal, hopeless section ruled by brutish hatred and nothing else” (33). Although Hurston’s appraisal, as Afflerbach reports, “received little notice at the time, her review anticipated postwar intellectuals like James Baldwin, who would later reject what they saw as Wright’s narrowly programmatic politics and pathological view of black identity” (319). In “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (1945) as well as in “Many Thousands Gone,” Baldwin censures the genre of remonstration in general for sentimentality and romanticism, on the one hand, and ressentiment, on the other.11 Such writings, laments Baldwin, “are fantasies, connecting nowhere with reality, sentimental” (“EPN” 19). Baldwin posited this complaint despite the feeling among some white critics that Wright’s fiction showed that the African American had “developed,” as Burgum writes, “a hatred of his old submissive self and a greater hatred for the whites who pretended to love and admire him in proportion as he remained without dignity” (“PD” 340). Instead, asserts Baldwin, “the militant men and women of the thirties were not […] significantly emancipated from their antecedents.” No matter how “they might extol Russia, their concept of a better world was quite helplessly American and betrayed a certain thinness of imagination, a suspect reliance on suspect and badly digested formulae, and a positively fretful romantic haste” (“MTG” 33). For Baldwin, ressentiment was the most lamentable aspect of Uncle Tom’s Children, an attribute that supposedly tarnished Wright’s entire career. Although Wright recoiled from the Harlem Renaissance, Baldwin classified him under that banner. “As for this New Negro, it was Wright

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who became his most eloquent spokesman; and his work, from its beginning, is most clearly committed to the social struggle” (“MTG” 32), asserts Baldwin. Leaving aside the considerable question of what relationship precisely the artist bears to the revolutionary, the reality of man as a social being is not his only reality and that artist is strangled who is forced to deal with human beings solely in social terms; and who has, moreover, as Wright had, the necessity thrust on him of being the representative of some thirteen million people. It is a false responsibility (since writers are not congressmen) and impossible, by its nature, of fulfillment. (“MTG” 32–33)

In Burgum’s relatable (yet more questionable) judgment, “the Negro, once given a taste of dignity, drew the lesson that he had only himself to depend upon, and developed an inner core of tenacious resentment” (“PD” 340). While Mrs. Newsome’s formulaic outlook in James’s The Ambassadors allows her to avoid becoming one of life’s victims, but leaves her practically bereft of life, Baldwin’s formulaic outlook on Wright’s oeuvre concentrates on agential ressentiment, but leaves Baldwin practically bereft of penetrating insight. “Hatred smoulders through these pages like sulphur fire,” he writes of Native Son, “all of Bigger’s life is controlled, defined by his hatred and his fear” (“EPN” 22). Baldwin thought Wright competitively envious of other discourses, especially those of politics and sociology; as a result, Wright resigned his life to an artistic fight that he was discursively destined to lose. “Wright’s voice first was heard and the struggle which promised for a time to shape his work and give it purpose also fixed it in an ever more unrewarding rage,” avers Baldwin. “Recording his days of anger he has also nevertheless recorded, as no Negro before him had ever done, that fantasy Americans hold in their minds when they speak of the Negro: that fantastic and fearful image which we have lived with since the first slave fell beneath the lash. This is the significance of Native Son and also, unhappily, its overwhelming limitation” (“MTG” 33–34). Other factors have weighed against Uncle Tom’s Children too. “In the recent controversy over the literary achievement of Richard Wright,” as James R. Giles remarks in “Richard Wright’s Successful Failure” (1973), “the novelist’s first book, Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), has been generally ignored,” because Wright scholarship “has centered around Native Son, Black Boy, and the existential overtones of The Outsider.” This focus, which “relegate[s] Wright’s first full-length work to a relatively minor

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level of importance,” is “extremely shortsighted” (256). Despite Giles’s intervention and the intercessions of Alessandro Portelli (1997), Damon Marcel DeCoste (1998), and Carla Cappetti (2001), that myopia remains widespread. Unfortunately, Wright’s own judgment supports this indifference, undercutting the critical worth of Uncle Tom’s Children. “When the reviews of that book began to appear,” he attests in “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” (7 March 1940), “I realized that I had made an awfully naïve mistake. I found that I had written a book which even bankers’ daughters could read and weep over and feel good about.” He swore, “no one would weep over” the next book he published: “it would be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears” (xxvii). To Wright, Uncle Tom’s Children was inadvertently pitiable, eliciting an onanistic substitute from its readers, failing to extinguish all peculiar responses; and this evaluation, as Giles notes, “seems to have remained unchallenged ever since” (256). As Giles contends, however, Wright’s judgment “seems, pace the author, as shortsighted” (256) as the majority of subsequent criticism is. Indeed, acknowledgment of Uncle Tom’s Children as a classic of American literature has been hindered withal by what Cappetti identifies as Wright’s “restricted […] recognition within the American and African American modernist canons” (42). The attendant critical obstacles include disparagement as a Southern author, on the one hand, and disparagement as a realist in the time of modernisms, on the other. In accepting that Wright’s protagonists are trapped by their Southern environment, as Portelli observes, critics often fall into the trap of reductively interpreting them as characters “stripped” of “humanity” (255). In accepting that Wright’s writing is fundamentally nonmodernist, as DeCoste observes, critics often fall into the trap of reductively interpreting his work as corralled and betrayed by the “inherent conservatism of realist conventions” (143). In contrast, by reading Uncle Tom’s Children thematically, Giles mitigates the Marxist tenor that dominates much of Wright’s canon and most of Wright criticism, concluding not only that “Wright’s own low opinion of his work represents an excess of self-criticism,” but also that the work itself “cannot be dismissed as a collection of unrelated stories” (266). In interpreting Uncle Tom’s Children as a formative novel and in concentrating the analysis on one chapter of that novel in particular, “Down by the Riverside,” the interpretation that follows in the present volume parses Wright’s text through a philosophically inflected lens. This procedure

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accords with the opinions of Giles, Portelli, DeCoste, and Cappetti in denying the reductive critical tendency toward Wright’s early work. This process helps to resurrect and reanimate Giles’s overall aim of promoting the importance of Wright’s first major publication by convincingly setting Uncle Tom’s Children within an interpretive context that is at once literary and philosophical, a twofold setting that radically complements Nussbaum’s choice of James’s The Ambassadors for reconciling literature with the philosophy of ethics. Understood as one of Wright’s foremost gifts both to literature and to minoritarian struggle, Uncle Tom’s Children offsets negative critical tendencies in expressing the dignitarian imperative that originates with Immanuel Kant. The present discussion agrees with Shelby, therefore, in reading “Uncle Tom’s Children, not as protest literature, but as philosophical fiction” (515). As Cappetti notes, “Charles Johnson is a rare African American intellectual and artist who praises rather than denigrates Wright for his engagement with ‘European’ philosophy” (61n11). This praise is restricted, however, not only to a brief section from Johnson’s short essay on “Where Philosophy and Fiction Meet” (1988) but also to Wright’s later works. “Although Richard Wright is generally read, and rightly, as a writer of racial protest,” observes Johnson, “his finest works, including Native Son and his Dostoyevskian parable, ‘The Man Who Lived Underground,’ are compatible with the most interesting ideas in continental philosophy during the thirties and forties” (93). In a complementary move, designating Uncle Tom’s Children as philosophical literature draws the related lens of textual criticism back to Wright’s formative years, on the one hand, and to earlier, more redoubtable, yet no less contested, philosophy from continental Europe, on the other. Wright’s first full-length work portrays at once the ontological necessity of personal dignity and the minoritarian difficulties of realizing that attribute. The more formidable, yet no less disputed, philosophy originates with Kant. “In America,” writes Johnson, “a black philosopher lives with the possibility of being badly misunderstood by blacks and whites both. Like Cross Damon in Richard Wright’s The Outsider or the nerdish fireman in last year’s film Roxanne [1987], the philosopher might even hide from friends and co-workers the fact that he’s been poring over Kant and Heidegger in the privacy of his room and, stranger yet, has found something in German philosophy that speaks to him” (91). Whatever the extent and explicitness of Wright’s philosophical studies, however, the incidents that Uncle Tom’s Children delineate “are about how the oppressed, from

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the standpoint of ethics, should respond to the injustices that weigh so heavily upon them” (Shelby 516). The book presents the ethical options available to minoritarians in certain circumstances and the decisions such circumstances force them to make. Shelby effectively concurs: “the focus of Wright’s stories is on the difficult everyday ethical choices that blacks faced under Jim Crow” (517). “At best, Negro writing has been external to the lives of educated Negroes themselves,” states Wright in “Blueprint for Negro Writing.” “That the productions of their writers should have been something of a guide in their daily living is a matter which seems never to have been raised seriously” (97). Wright, therefore, sought “to be recognized for the valued agent he is” (102), with any acknowledgment helping to propagate and champion the individual and collective agencies of all minoritarians. Baldwin would lament Wright’s suffocation under the burden of representing some thirteen million African Americans, but Wright himself initially embraced this political commitment. Chicago—Robert Abbott’s dubious “Promised Land,” in which Wright would nevertheless “stay for ten years, his most formative years as a writer” (Olson 22)—elicited Wright’s willingness.12 At the Chicago John Reed Club, as Yarborough chronicles, “Wright found among the bright, ambitious young people there a commitment to both art and radical politics.” What is more, “the club’s interracial membership provided Wright for the first time with a sense of community that had been lacking in his relations with both whites and, all too often, blacks” (xvii). There was something of the Thomist virtus to Wright’s communal commitment; and his commitment to art, politics, ethics, and excellences of the speculative intellect is evident in Uncle Tom’s Children. While the first section of four chapters helps to chart the initial appearance of what Yarborough calls “a black revolutionary consciousness” (xxvi), the second section of two chapters “allows Wright to introduce for the first time in the book the ideological alternative offered to Afro-Americans by communism” (xxvii). Hence, concentrating on the first section of Uncle Tom’s Children generally abstracts Wright’s art from political specifics, allowing an analytical focus on that evolutionary consciousness. This analytical perspective reveals Wright’s first, basic, and principal commitment: loyalty to the common ground shared by the arts and ethics, with the fundamentals of “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow”—Wright’s dramatization of “constant injustice and humiliation while maintaining a modicum of personal

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dignity” (Yarborough xxiv)—serving to unify Uncle Tom’s Children as a whole. “We are dignified moral beings,” as Nussbaum correctly explains of Kant’s perspective, “and it is in virtue of our moral powers of will and judgment that we can be dignified, making rather than being made, agents rather than victims or dependents.” All such agents treat all others with an equal respect for their personal dignity as moral beings. “What seems like insensibility in the women of Woollett,” as Nussbaum maintains of Mrs. Newsome and her immediate circle in James’s The Ambassadors, “is, from their point of view, the high determination to treat each other person as an autonomous moral will, relating to them through the moral faculties and judging them with a stringency that shows respect for their freedom.” From her exalted social position, Mrs. Newsome expresses this “keen sense of human dignity—of an idea of our worth as agents that is the basis of Kantian morality (and through this of Rawls’s Kantianism).” In fine, as this ethical foundation asserts, “we do not need to go through the world as the plaything of its forces, living ‘from hand to mouth,’ merely ‘floating’ with its currents” (“PE” 250). According to Nussbaum’s interpretation, “we see the Kantian attitude as one that gives special dignity and exaltation,” which enables its agents “to triumph over life and to avoid becoming [life’s] victims” (“PE” 250). Yet, as Nussbaum insists of James’s Mrs. Newsome and her kind, “they triumph over life, they don’t live.” Such agents perceive a different reality to those who surrender themselves to perceptive equilibrium; agents of reflective equilibrium could not describe the same reality that agents of perceptive equilibrium do. “It is because Mrs Newsome is no mere caricature, but a brilliantly comic rendering of some of the deepest and most appealing features of Kantian morality,” believes Nussbaum, “that the novel has the balance and power that it does” (“PE” 250; emphasis original). There is little comical, however, in James’s caricature of majoritarian agents who are unable to conceptualize that minoritarian agents cannot— or are rarely, if ever, allowed to—express their own inalienable dignity, and Richard Wright offers a fundamental contrast to Henry James in this regard. In one difference, Wright explicitly presents majoritarians who personify a disrespect in judging minoritarians as inferior others, this judgment dismissing and denying minoritarians the freedom and ability to fulfill their lives. In another difference, Wright explicitly presents minoritarians who personify alterity, others who do not experience and could not describe the same reality as either group of agents (the reflective or the

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perceptive) portrayed in James’s late novels. This compounded negative captures how minoritarians must live in the sociopolitical context that Uncle Tom’s Children offers up for scrutiny. Philosophers who consider deontological and existential questions “typically abstract away from the concrete sociopolitical circumstances within which individuals make their lives” (Shelby 513). This form of abstraction applies to James’s philosophical approach. Ethical doubts undermine this stance, however, because serious injustices shape the sociopolitical context about which James writes; injustices that he seemingly cannot see; contexts that contrive to maintain these injustices. Wright’s philosophical approach in Uncle Tom’s Children recognizes at once injustices, the sociopolitics derived therefrom, and the self-enforcing circularity of oppression that characterizes the resulting societies. The difference between ideal and nonideal philosophical theories hereby offers one means of differentiating between the ethical approaches of Henry James and Richard Wright. An ideal theory assumes that agents act in contexts that are reasonably just, applying what they learn to better inform the choices necessary to improve their somewhat less than ideal lives. A nonideal theory concerns how agents ought to live in the absence of justice. “In an effort to find some measure of satisfaction in life under unjust conditions,” notes Shelby, “the oppressed may try to acquire material comfort, seek love and friendship, express themselves through art and religion, and attempt to achieve personal goals despite the obstacles that have been placed unfairly in their path” (514). These efforts must include withal agential attempts to live and to die with dignity. Indeed, among the contemporary plaudits for the four chapters of the original edition of Uncle Tom’s Children was Sterling A. Brown’s commendation in “From the Inside” (1938) of their “power and originality [in] revealing a people whose struggles and essential dignity have too long been unexpressed” (448). Nussbaum’s interpretation of Kantian dignity in “Perceptive Equilibrium” is rightly all encompassing. “We,” she asserts, “are dignified moral beings” (250). “Call a theory universal if it applies to everyone, collective if it claims success at the collective level,” explains Derek Parfit in Reasons and Persons (1984). “Some theories have both features. One example is a Kantian morality. This tells each to do only what he could rationally will everyone to do. The plans or policies of each must be tested at the collective level. For a Kantian, the essence of morality is the move from each to we” (92; emphasis original). After expressing her inclusive

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sentiments, however, Nussbaum’s (majoritarian) viewpoint leads her astray: “and it is in virtue of our moral powers of will and judgment that we can be dignified, making rather than being made, agents rather than victims or dependents” (“PE” 250). For, as minor literature warns, sociopolitical contexts exist in which the recognition of humans as dignified moral beings is far from all encompassing. In pursuing a theory of perceptive equilibrium that attunes literary theory and ethical theory, Nussbaum further acknowledges the “need […] to get a much richer and deeper understanding of the Kantian conception and of its modern continuations” (“PE” 256), a demand that “want[s] to look at the arguments of Kantian philosophers directly and seriously in their own right” (“PE” 257). In pursuing a theory of reflective equilibrium, this requirement must clear Kant’s moral theory of Kant’s immature prejudices (without denying the existence of these earlier, disgraceful faults). “Kant’s moral theory was at odds with other views he had endorsed,” as David McCabe admits in “Kant Was a Racist: Now What?” (2019), “and […] this conflict took time to get sorted out,” a process that has been the task of Kant’s philosophical descendants as much as it had been for the maturing Kant himself. McCabe begins his defense of the mature Kant in answering “the question of what we philosophers distinctively do, i.e., what we are especially interested in.” Broadly speaking, “we are interested in how ideas join together to form compelling arguments and frameworks for addressing important questions.” Why read the work of philosophers? “Not for their specific views on a particular subject (e.g., Kant’s insistence that it was always wrong to lie), but for their theoretical frameworks elaborating and giving structure to central considerations we need to address” (7). The overall sweep of Kant’s moral theory is a reason to class his earlier racial and sexual comments as needful of rejection for their unworthiness. Judged diachronically across his canon, Kant is (at best) an inconsistent egalitarian, whose prejudices informed as they echoed the ideological, theoretical, and political mainstreams of his time. Judged synchronically at his canonical closure, however, Kant is a consistent egalitarian, though his earlier intolerances must always shadow this conclusion to ensure that those prejudices do not pervert a twenty-first-century understanding of Kant’s final moral theory. “There is something deeply troubling and profoundly misleading about racially sanitizing Kant’s views and then representing them as if they were the views of the pre-sanitized Kant,” objects Charles W. Mills. “Obviously

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the principle of respect for persons can be extended in a racially indifferent way to include all races,” admits Mills. “But this is an extension,” as Mills adds, “not a minor technicality” (189). The understanding of Kantian ethics accepted in the present volume, which recommends Parfit’s richer and deeper appreciation of the dignitarian imperative espoused by Kant, hopes to answer Mills’s salient point. Parfit developed his understanding of unconditional dignity over many years, with reference to Kant, Henry Sidgwick, John Rawls, Susan Wolf, Allen W.  Wood, Barbara Herman, T. M. Scanlon, and many others, and he carefully presented that understanding across his two major publications, Reasons and Persons and On What Matters.13 Parfit’s insights help to unlock aspects of Wright’s portrayal of agential dignity in Uncle Tom’s Children, but most immediately, as Parfit acknowledges, “Kant is sometimes thought of as a cold, dry, rationalist” (OWM 1:xliv). As The Ambassadors reveals, James thought Kant a frigid individual, and Nussbaum agrees with James: “The two dominant moral theories of our own time, Kantianism and Utilitarianism,” she opines in “The Discernment of Perception,” “have been no less suspicious of the passions” than Plato was. “For Kant,” continues Nussbaum, The passions are invariably selfish and aimed at one’s own states of satisfaction. Even in the context of love and friendship, he urges us to avoid becoming subject to their influence; for an action will have genuine moral worth only if it is chosen for its own sake; and given his conception of the passions he cannot allow that action chosen only or primarily because of passion could be chosen for its own sake. The Utilitarian believes that a passion like personal love frequently impedes rationality by being too parochial: it leads us to emphasize personal ties and to rank the nearer above the further, obstructing that fully impartial attitude toward the world that is the hallmark of Utilitarian rationality. (76)

“But,” as Parfit stresses, Kant “is really an emotional extremist” (OWM 1:xliv). Parfit adduces confirmation of this opinion from Sidgwick. “Oh, how I sympathize with Kant,” wrote Sidgwick to H.  G. Dakyns (29 January 1868), “with his passionate yearning for synthesis and condemned by his reason to criticism” (177). While Geoffrey Hill thinks Sidgwick’s sentence “speaks more for the moodiness of mid-Victorian intellectualism than for the mood of Kant” (113), Parfit thinks Kant’s claims about ends reveal not only Kant’s passion about dignity but also Kant’s passion per se.

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“As Kant argued,” relates philosopher Michael Onyebuchi Eze in “Humanitatis-Eco (Eco-Humanism): An African Environmental Theory” (2017), “we are noumenal selves, that is, objects of intrinsic moral value, ends in ourselves.” For Kant, “as a kingdom of ends, we are the ones who give value to things. A work of art is appreciated because we give it value— a conditional value” (622). Thus, another implicit reason why Nussbaum distances herself from Kant is that Kantian perception concerns aesthetic judgment rather than its ethical counterpart. “The experience of the beautiful in art, or aesthetic judgment,” explains Jennifer Anna Gosetti-­ Ferencei, “is the focus of much of Kant’s Critique of Judgment [1790] and forms the background for his comments on poetry” (104). “Aesthetic judgment according to Kant,” as Gosetti-Ferencei expounds, “does not identify beauty within the object itself, but refers to the ‘free play’ between the faculties, imagination, and understanding, which its perception provokes.” The rational mind separately navigates the mutually exclusive realms in which the human agent operates—the moral domain of self-governance; the physical domain of subordination—with aesthetic judgment enabling what Gosetti-Ferencei calls “a kind of intuition of the supersensible in this free play” that “bridges the[se] two otherwise incompatible worlds” (104). “The (aesthetical) attributes of an object” (118), observes Kant in Critique of Judgment, “do not, like logical attributes, represent what lies in our concepts of the sublimity and majesty of creation, but something different, which gives occasion to the Imagination to spread itself over a number of kindred representations, that arouse more thought than can be expressed in a concept determined by words” (119). As a passionate dignitarian, Kant distinguishes three types of end: ends-­ to-­be-produced, existent ends, and ends-in-themselves. Kant defines this triune in his first mature work, a volume that stands as one of the foundational texts of modern ethics, his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785). Parfit provides a concise summary of these ends. “What Kant calls ends-to-be-produced are the aims or outcomes that we could try to achieve or bring about. These are ends in the ordinary sense, as in the claim that the relief of suffering is a good end.” Kant contrasts ends-to-be-produced “with what he calls existent or already existing ends, of which his main examples are rational beings, or people.” The third category encompasses ends-in-themselves: “Such things have what Kant calls dignity, which he defines as absolute, unconditional, and incomparable value or worth. Such value is supreme, or unsurpassed, in the sense that nothing else has greater value” (1:239).

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Rationality is also an end-to-be-produced. “We ought to use our rationality, and we can try to become more rational by developing our rational abilities,” avers Parfit. “Kant calls dignity a value that is ‘infinitely far above’ a lower kind of value, which he calls price” (OWM 1:241). Things that have mere price include pleasure and the absence of pain. In contrast, “people are not ends-to-be-produced,” their value being of a different kind, and “the continued existence of rational beings is another end-to-­ be-produced with supreme value” (OWM 1:240).14 Kant passionately believes in the human attribute of rationality, as he states in Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, “something the existence of which in itself has an absolute worth” (78; emphasis original). A universe without rational beings, as Kant asserts in Critique of Judgment, “would be mere waste, in vain, and without final purpose” (293). In fine, then, Kant offers what philosophers today call his Formula of Humanity as End in Itself (FH). This offering is of little comfort to Wood. “No doubt,” he remarks in “Humanity as End in Itself” (2011), “human vulnerability to nature, and even more human wickedness, will forever prevent there actually being such a realm of ends” (81).15 Yet, in accordance with the strictures of logic, as Wood himself observes in Kant’s Ethical Thought (1999), “Kant often insists that even the worst human beings have dignity” (133).16 In dignitarian terms, therefore, a person of good will is on a par with a person of bad will. “Certainly no human being in a state can be without any dignity,” asserts Kant, “since he at least has the dignity of a citizen. The exception is someone who has lost it by his own crime, because of which, though he is kept alive, he is made a mere tool of another’s choice (either of the state or of another citizen)” (MM 471; emphasis original). For, although Kant “identifies dignity with the capacity for morality or for having a good will,” as Wood remarks, “he never makes it contingent on acting morally or on actual goodness of will” (KET 133; emphasis original). “This part of Kant’s view is,” believes Parfit, “a profound truth.” Even so, “the value of the morally worst people is not a kind of goodness” (OWM 1:240), people bearing “dignity or value in the quite different sense that, given their nature as rational beings, they must always be treated in certain helpful or respectful ways” (OWM 1:241). The closing words of Wright’s memoir Black Boy express a relatable belief. With ever watchful eyes and bearing scars, visible and invisible, I headed North, full of a hazy notion that life could be lived with dignity, that the personalities of others should not be violated, that men should be able to confront other men without fear or shame, and that if men were lucky in their

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living on earth they might win some redeeming meaning for their having struggled and suffered here beneath the stars. (228)

This closure to Black Boy finds nascent dramatization in the plight and eventual flight of the protagonist of “Big Boy Leaves Home,” the rational Big Boy Morrison, in Uncle Tom’s Children. “The theme of ‘Big Boy Leaves Home’ is a familiar one in American literature generally and the central one of Wright’s fiction as a whole,” remarks Keneth Kinnamon in “The Pastoral Impulse in Richard Wright” (1969), namely, “the initiation of a youth into violence and his escape” (43). In “Big Boy Leaves Home,” this violent ritual erupts from a benign situation in which, “laughing easily, four black boys,” as Wright’s heterodiegetic narrator observes, “came out of the woods into cleared pasture” (17), with Morrison, Lester, Buck, and Bobo, who comprise this quartet of teenagers, having chosen to skip school. During their somewhat aimless wanderings, the swimming hole on “ol man” Harvey’s land and the prospect of a refreshing dip soon come to mind. Bobo’s unease, however, is apparent. He is reluctant to break structural delimitations based on race, however innocuous the prospective transgression might be. “Yuh know ol man Harvey don erllow no n****rs t swim” (25). Bobo recognizes the conflation of the nonhuman animal and the African American intended by Harvey’s “NO TRESPASSIN” (25) sign—“Mean ain no dogs n n****rs erllowed” (25)—and he fears the racism invested in that conflation. On the one hand, sociopolitical delimitation manifests itself in topographical (or structural) demarcation, with barbed wire protecting the pool from outsiders. On the other hand, racists often cast their victims as animals, as will explicitly happen when Harvey’s son Jim calls Bobo and his friends “black sonsofbitches” (31). For the present, and notwithstanding both his braggadocio and his chiding of Bobo’s reluctance, “Big Boy looked carefully in all directions” before “jerking off his overalls” (26). Bobo is then coerced: “Big Boy grabbed him about the waist” (26) and ducks him. Jim’s girlfriend now comes across the quartet. “They stared, their hands instinctively covering their groins. Then they scrambled to their feet. The white woman backed slowly out of sight. They stood for a moment, looking at one another” (29). While Lester and Buck are for escaping unclothed, Morrison determines to retain some self-respect, despite his fear (“Big Boy’s throat felt tight” [30]), and Bobo shares this resolve (“Lady, we wanna git our cloes” [30]). Violence ensues: the woman screams; Jim appears; he shoots dead both Lester and Buck. In a sense, they pay with their lives for failing to

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uphold their basic dignity, self-respect that the undertones of Morrison’s earlier admonition (“LAS ONE INS A OL DEAD DOG!” [26]) had premonitorily drowned out. With its concomitant racial dangers, the otherwise salubrious swimming hole in Wright’s “Big Boy Leaves Home” finds its Northern counterpart in the insalubrious hollows where “children played, and rolled about in the mud,” in The Jungle by one of Mencken’s, and thus Wright’s, favored authors, Upton Sinclair. The neighborhood encompassing the Union Stock Yards, the industrial center of American meatpacking at the time of Wright’s residence in Chicago, was officially named the Town of Lake. Residents called the district Packingtown. This colloquialism captured both the industrial purpose of the locality and the conditions in which its workforce had to live. The streets of Packingtown resemble, as The Jungle describes, “a miniature topographical map” in which “the roadway was commonly several feet lower than the level of the houses, which were sometimes joined by high board walks; there were no pavements—there were mountains and valleys and rivers, gullies and ditches, and great hollows full of stinking green water” (32). As Wright would note, not politics alone would urge his friend and stockyard worker Oscar Hunter to join the International Brigades in 1936, not politics alone would urge Hunter to move to New York after his return from Spain in 1938; and Sinclair had already captured the need for this other urgency. In The Jungle, Lithuania immigrant Jurgis Rudkus “talked lightly about work, because he was young. They told him stories about the breaking down of men, there in the stockyards of Chicago, and of what had happened to them afterwards—stories to make your flesh creep, but Jurgis would only laugh.” Youthful, “and a giant besides,” with “too much health in him,” Jurgis “could not even imagine how it would feel to be beaten. ‘That is well enough for men like you,’ he would say, ‘silpnas, puny fellows—but my back is broad’” (23). Indeed, Jurgis will be an exception, surviving Abbott’s “Promised Land” to partake of the socialist demand for revolution, the novel ending with Jurgis’s attendance at a political rally, where the orator “was young, hungry-looking, full of fire,” an orator who “seemed the very spirit of the revolution” (412). Jurgis’s extended family, however, will prove less exceptional. “During the four year span of the novel (approximately 1900 to 1904),” as Louise Carroll Wade enumerates, “Jurgis’s father succumbs to tuberculosis, his brother-in-law vanishes, his young wife is forced into prostitution by her boss and dies in childbirth, his son drowns in a ditch, his wife’s cousin

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chooses the brothel, and two more children die—one from convulsions after eating smoked sausage, the other consumed by rats while in a beer-­ induced stupor” (80). As Wade observes, this familial fate “tests credulity” (80); but Sinclair’s message, I would argue, does not: capitalism serves capitalists and the bourgeoisie, rather than the working class, and often does so without testing systemic credibility. The closing words of the novel, the orator’s socialist rally cry, countering this capitalist essence, invokes such an examination: We shall have the sham reformers self-stultified and self-convicted; we shall have the radical Democracy left without a lie with which to cover its nakedness! And then will begin the rush that will never be checked, the tide that will never turn till it has reached its flood—that will be irresistible, overwhelming—the rallying of the outraged working-men of Chicago to our standard! And we shall organize them, we shall drill them, we shall marshal them for the victory! We shall bear down the opposition, we shall sweep it before us—and Chicago will be ours Chicago will be ours! CHICAGO WILL BE OURS! (413; emphasis original)

The comparison between Henry James’s debonair Chad Newsome in The Ambassadors, as an independently wealthy son who acts the cosmopolite, and Upton Sinclair’s frostbitten Stanislova Jurgis in The Jungle, as a starving, drink-ridden, thirteen-year-old son who dies at work to be eaten by rats, is both stark and malodorous. In Wright’s “Big Boy Leaves Home,” Morrison’s subsequent tussle with Jim leaves the young African American with two options: he must either kill Jim or let Jim kill him; he chooses the former. In a concomitant sense, while Jim’s determination to deny the boys their basic dignity costs him his life, Morrison’s and Bobo’s resolve in this matter ensures their survival—or, at least, a stay of execution. For, having discovered the predicament facing Morrison and Bobo, which is death by lynching, the members of the African-American community (specifically, the church brothers and their elder) come to their aid in an act of synergistic mutualism that is at once rational and morally commendable. The community decides to smuggle the two youngsters out of the county the following day. Will Sanders, who drives for the Magnolia Express Company, “is taking a truck o goods t Chicawgo in the mawnin” (29). If Morrison and Bobo can survive until then, Sanders can stow them away. This leaves the two youngsters to endure the night as best they can.

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“Ah knows where Will passes erlong wid the truck out on Bullards Road,” says Morrison; and he and Bobo, if successful in taking leave of their respective families, “kin hide” nearby “in one of them ol kilns […] we built” (29). Like burrows, these kilns carry animal connotations, but Morrison is supremely rational on reaching Bullards Road. Hiding in a hole in the ground would seem to be undignified—and Morrison must accept this fossorial role—but this belittling experience is the least of his concerns. Rationality urges this recourse: when faced with the need to hide, a need that involves picking a hole in the ground for sanctuary, Morrison is nothing other than human. “Wright’s early heroes are […] alienated from their world, unable to find purpose in an American society that denies them their dignity and humanity” (405), argues Steven J. Rubin. More accurately adduced, however, Morrison denies that denial. For, despite the circumstances forced on him, Morrison retains his dignity. He is no Buridan’s Ass. “He stopped at the foot of the hill, trying to choose between two patches of black kilns high above him. He went to the left, for there lay the ones he, Bobo, Lester, and Buck had dug only last week” (46). Buridan’s Ass, as Parfit recounts in Reasons and Persons, “starved to death between two equally nourishing bales of hay.” The ass could find “no reason to eat one of these bales of hay before eating the other” (258). In contrast, Morrison is rational enough to avoid being irrationally rational, and he chooses a kiln. In tacitly destroying the racist bedrock of animalism, Parfit goes further than Kant does, acknowledging dignity in accordance with sentience. “Even the lowliest worm, if it can feel pain, has a kind of dignity, in an extended Kantian sense,” writes Parfit. “A worm cannot be in itself good, but its nature makes it a being on which it would be wrong to inflict pointless pain” (OWM 1:241). With his self-avowed “recognition of the dignity of non-human animals and the direct duties owed to them,” Gilabert effectively shares Parfit’s approach, proffering an intuitively more plausible view than Kant’s perspective does. This wider outlook is quite logical: the alternative of “uniformly lump[ing] together every entity that is not a ‘person’ with moral agency into the ontological heap of ‘things,’” as Gilabert concludes, being simply “implausible” (559).17 Gilabert further criticizes Kant’s “narrow view of the basis of dignity” for “fail[ing] to capture all that is intrinsically valuable in human beings” (558; emphasis original). In short, as Gilabert notes, “the dignity of human beings need not only include what makes them different from other animals. The key point is to identify a status that individual human

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beings have independently of their membership of a nation, class and other groups they sometimes invoke to harm or ignore each other’s freedom and well-being” (573n13). Hence, when Morrison discovers a rattlesnake in his chosen sanctuary, the choice of kill or be killed again faces him, and he again makes the logical decision. “He stopped, teeth clenched. He had to kill this snake. Jus had t kill im!” This pit offers him sanctuary. “He waved the stick again, looking at the snake before, thinking of a mob behind” (47). Morrison’s thinking implies that he appreciates how wrong it would be to inflict pointless pain, but he passionately believes that his existence, above his membership of the African-American, or any other, human community, has a worth in excess of nonhuman life. Having killed the snake, Morrison reconsiders the events that precipitated his current situation, and Wright’s employment of free indirection— “free indirect style,” explains David Lodge, “goes back at least as far as Jane Austen, but was employed with ever-increasing scope and virtuosity by modern novelists” (43)—evinces his protagonist’s replacement, however temporarily, of the heterodiegetic narrator, the hitherto masterful voice of narration. “He shifted his body to ease the cold damp of the ground, and thought back over the day. Yeah, hed been dam right erbout not wantin t go swimming” (49). Morrison herein masters his own narrative, and Wright’s free-indirect usage in this instance, and sporadically throughout Uncle Tom’s Children, finds a close ally in Zora Neale Hurston’s employment of the same device in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). “The ultimate sign of the dignity and strength of the black voice,” to appropriate the comments of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., about protagonist Janie Crawford-Killicks-Starks-Woods in Hurston’s novel, “is this use of a dialect-informed free indirect discourse” (215).18 Morrison, seemingly assured of leaving home for a life in the North, now starts to think about thinking. “Ef hed followed his right min hed neverve gone n got inter all this trouble. At first hed said naw. But shucks, somehow hed just went on wid the res. Yeah, he shoulda went on t school tha mawnin” (49). Morrison hereafter falls into logical speculation on numerous occasions that night. For example, at one point, he wonders, “Mabbe tha white man wuznt dead?” soon concluding, however, that whether Jim had survived or not, it was “better” to “wait erwhile” (51). In this instance, as Bobo’s fate will confirm, Morrison has again decided correctly. In fact, Morrison has attained the necessary state for improving his chances of survival: a state of reflective (rather than perceptive) equilibrium—“Big Boy had no feelings now” (53)—a state in which thoughtful

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judgments and dignitarian principles coincide. The rational Morrison, with the mindful intervention of the church brothers and their elder, has so far managed to survive. That success helps to maintain Morrison’s rational command of his feelings and actions. In consequence, his thoughts come before, and thereby suppress, the emotions that try to arise when he witnesses the outcome of Bobo’s failure to avoid the lynch mob. “There came a roar. Tha mus be Bobo; tha mus be Bobo … In spite of his fear, Big Boy looked” (54). What Morrison witnesses is enough to make most individuals lose rational control. “Big Boy could see the barrel surrounded by flames.” Staring hard, trying to pick out Bobo, Morrison’s “eyes played over a long dark spot near the fire.” That seemingly anonymous blotch is Bobo. “Fanned by wind, flames leaped higher. He jumped. That dark spot had moved” (56). Either notwithstanding or because of this horror, Morrison maintains reflective equilibrium, with Bobo’s lynching corroborating Morrison’s decision to remain underground: “He had no feelings now, no fears” (57). In this state of mind, Morrison must, for the third time, either kill or be killed. One of the lyncher’s dogs “was barking at the mouth of the hole, barking furiously, sensing a presence there.” In response, Morrison “balled himself into a knot and clung to the bottom, his knees and shins buried in water.” Morrison continues to resist inflicting pointless pain, but the dog is unrelenting. “The bark came louder. He heard paws scraping and felt the hot scent of dog breath on his face. Green eyes glowed and drew nearer as the barking, muffled by the closeness of the hole, beat upon his eardrums” (58). Despite this assault on his senses, Morrison retains reflective equilibrium, silently silencing his attacker. In the darkness of the kiln, Morrison throttles the dog, leaving “the sound of his own breathing filling the hole,” and hearing “shouts and footsteps above him going past” (59). The next day Morrison manages to escape, traveling with Sanders to the city that informed Wright’s formative train of thought, Chicago. Morrison hereby reenacts the flight that some antebellum African Americans had previously undertaken. “Impelled by faith in God and a commitment to liberty and human dignity comparable (the slave narrative often stresses) to that of America’s Founding Fathers,” as William L. Andrews charts in “Narrating Slavery” (1998), “the slave undertakes an arduous quest for freedom that climaxes in his or her arrival in the North” (16). According to Yarborough, Morrison’s comparable “flight

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from death manifests a survival instinct which, Wright would contend, can serve as the first step toward a more assertive and potentially successful form of self-defense” (xxvi)—because although reflection and perception inform that decision to flee, the former attribute, according to Wright’s presentation in “Big Boy Leaves Home,” must clearly dominate the latter.

Notes 1. “Silt” was republished later the same year as “The Man Who Saw the Flood.” Importantly, considering Wright’s lifelong quest for knowledge, Ella had been a schoolmistress. She only “started to work on a farm,” as Glenda R. Carpio chronicles, “shortly after Richard was born” (xiii). 2. “The individual and isolated hunter and fisherman, with whom [Adam] Smith and [David] Ricardo begin,” rails Marx in Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (1858), “belongs among the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth-century Robinsonades” (lxxix). 3. Interestingly, Lesiba Teffo relates his African perspective on this struggle to the Kantian. “There is nothing inherently wrong with the Western or European models of leadership,” he avers, but “the African existential experience should take precedence over any other experience in matters pertaining to the continent” ([2017] 565). The philosophy most relevant to this purpose is Ubuntu/Botho: “the human quality reflecting and at the same time underpinning the dignity of the human person.” Decisionmaking is evaluative rather than emotional. Ubuntu/Botho “is a cohesive moral value inherent in all human persons” ([2008] 64). “Pertinent traits of Ubuntu/Botho are compassion, solidarity, social justice, forgiveness, reconciliation, inclusivity, and public-spiritedness, among others. It is important to accentuate the fact that Ubuntu/Botho is not peculiar to Africans.” Indeed, Ubuntu/Botho and Kantianism share much common ground, with Kant’s “Categorical Imperative, in consonance with the philosophy of Botho, stat[ing]: ‘Act according to that maxim that you can at the same time will it to become a universal law, whether in your own favour or that of another, never treat the other as a means but always as an end’” ([2017] 566). Edwin Etieyibo effectively supports Teffo’s submission: The idea of humane relations that one is encouraged to establish is very important for understanding the sorts of value that Ubuntu promotes. Of course‚ one establishes humane relations with others when one not only supports them in what they do but also sees oneself in their projects or simply takes their projects as one’s projects. This is similar in some way to Kant’s idea of supporting the rational ends of persons. For

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Kant, the categorical imperative, or more precisely the principle of autonomy which requires that we treat humanity or persons as rational ends, enjoins us to rationally make the ends of others our ends. Kant puts it this way: “For the ends of any person who is an end in himself must, if this idea is to have its full effect in me, be also, as far as possible, my ends.” (638) Etieyibo notes, however, “that there is a difference between Kant and Ubuntu’s idea of appropriating the ends of others as one’s end.” In Kant’s approach, according to Etieyibo’s reading, “we appropriate the ends of others as one’s own because that is simply our duty, but for Ubuntu we appropriate the ends of others not only in order to affirm our humanity, but also because we want to help others develop and fulfil their potentials.” In consequence, concludes Etieyibo, “whereas Kant’s idea appeals to only the notion of humanity and logical consistency of our actions, that of Ubuntu appeals both to that of humanity and of welfare” (651n30). Etieyibo hereby fails to identify the expectational side of Kant’s categorical imperative. 4. Fanon initially published The Wretched of the Earth in French as Les damnés de la terre (1961). The Wretched of the Earth is cited parenthetically hereafter as WE. 5. The Methods of Ethics remains Sidgwick’s masterpiece. The seventh and final edition of The Methods of Ethics (1907), used herein and cited parenthetically hereafter as ME, is the definitive version. 6. “‘A Child is Being Beaten’” is cited parenthetically hereafter as “CBB.” 7. From a British perspective, as these words are being typed, the London Metropolitan Police embodies not only such an institution, as condemned by Dame Louise Casey’s Report (2023), but also the seemingly impossible task of dislodging such institutionalism, her report coming twenty-four years after Sir William Macpherson’s Report (1999) on the botched investigation into the racially motivated murder of Stephen Lawrence (1974–93). 8. The expanded 1940 edition of Uncle Tom’s Children supplies all quotations used in the present volume. 9. Other prominent African-American critics agreed. “Countee Cullen and Sterling A.  Brown, writing for The African and The Nation,” as Ian Afflerbach adduces, “heralded the racial violence and tragic structure of Wright’s stories as helping to dismantle stubborn fantasies about the pastoral American South” (319). 10. “The Promise of Democracy and the Fiction of Richard Wright” is cited parenthetically hereafter as “PD.” 11. Ressentiment is the psychological state that results from barely repressed feelings of unsatisfiable hatred or envy. Friedrich Nietzsche sets out the concept in On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) as the psychological impe-

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tus behind the slave revolt in morality. “Everybody’s Protest Novel” is cited parenthetically hereafter as “EPN.” 12. “Wright educated himself in Chicago,” as Olson enumerates, “within leftist literary circles, among the artists and writers of the John Reed Club, at the George Cleveland Hall Branch Library, and through the interracial collaborations of the WPA’s Illinois Writers Project” (23). 13. Mills would remain unsatisfied: “If my analysis is correct, then we certainly should throw out Kant’s moral theory, since Kant’s moral theory makes whiteness and maleness prerequisites for full personhood!” (188; emphasis original). Mills would disagree, therefore, with Tsenay Serequeberhan’s earlier analysis, which Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze quotes (130) in “The Color of Reason: The Idea of ‘Race’ in Kant’s Anthropology” (1997) in support of his own similar stance, which accepts that “the singular and grounding metaphysical belief that European humanity is properly speaking isomorphic with the humanity of the human as such” (7; emphasis original) underpins Kant’s anthropology. 14. With these specific observations, Parfit echoes his closing remarks in Reasons and Persons concerning the destiny of humankind in the postatomic age: “I believe that if we destroy mankind, as we now can, this outcome will be much worse than most people think.” Compare three possible scenarios: peace, a nuclear war that kills ninety-nine percent of the worldwide population, a nuclear war that kills one hundred percent of the worldwide population. The second outcome is worse than the first result, and the third outcome would be worse than second result, but “which is the greater of these two differences?” Parfit asserts that the difference between the second and third outcomes is the “very much greater” (453; emphasis original). 15. Wood notes that Parfit questions his claim that FH is useful in practice. “In response to my claims that it provides us with the right value-basis for settling difficult issues and that on many difficult issues, it is an advantage of FH that different sides can use it to articulate their strongest arguments,” writes Wood, “Parfit asserts that on a wide range of disputed issues appeals to FH do not in fact constitute the strongest arguments of each side,” but Wood thinks “we may be talking past each other here” (“HEI” 2:65). 16. Kant’s Ethical Thought is cited parenthetically hereafter as KET. 17. Recognizing the dignity of nonhuman animals effectively broadens, without overstretching, Kant’s perspective. “The African tradition tends not to be anthropocentric in the specific sense of deeming everything nonhuman or nonpersonal as lacking moral status or as having merely instrumental value” (805), explains Thaddeus Metz. Instead, one common African approach is to think in terms of a ‘great chain of being,’ where human beings are more important than animals,

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but where animals nonetheless matter morally such that we have direct obligations to them to avoid treating them in harmful or degrading ways. The vitalist approach that grounds this stratified conception of moral status is a compelling alternative to Western environmental ethics that ascribes to animals either no moral status, as per Kantianism, or a moral status equal to ours, e.g., utilitarianism (feeling pleasure/pain or having desires) and biocentrism (being an organism). (805) 18. Although adding the spoken idiom of Wright’s African-American characters to her list of complaints against Uncle Tom’s Children—“Since the author himself is a Negro, his dialect is a puzzling thing. One wonders how he arrived at it. Certainly he does not write by ear unless he is tone-deaf”— Hurston does acknowledge “some beautiful writing” (33).

CHAPTER 4

Trolley Problems

“They drivin em like slaves.” —Richard Wright, “Down by the Riverside,” 69

At one level, “Down by the Riverside,” the tale that follows “Big Boy Leaves Home” in Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children, builds on the foundations laid by “Silt,” with catastrophic inundation from the Mississippi River serving as their common context. “Silt” and “Down by the Riverside,” writes William Howard, “not only create an authentic sense of the flood itself but also reach deeper beneath the historical accounts for the truth of the Southern black experience” (45). Despite the rudimentary nature of “Silt,” which precludes profound interpretation, a philosophical tenor undoubtedly imbues each tale. “The two flood stories,” avers Howard, “are about men, individuals, and the existential aloneness and numbness they feel as they are confronted with both an oppressive society and a frightening natural catastrophe” (47). More accurately adduced, the philosophical suffusion of “Silt” and “Down by the Riverside” is ontological, rather than existential, in character. Wright’s existential phase would not bear fruit until his relocation to Europe in 1946. “The first 38 years of my life were spent exclusively on the soil of my native land,” he would attest in “I Choose Exile” (4

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Wainwright, Kantian Dignity and Trolley Problems in the Literature of Richard Wright, American Literature Readings in the 21st Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40216-6_4

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December 1951). “But, at the moment of this writing, I live in voluntary exile in France and I like it. There is nothing in the life of America that I miss or yearn for. Barring war or catastrophe, I intend to remain in exile” (1). Yet, as Howard rightly argues, “there are signs in these stories that he is beginning to seek such a philosophy as an alternative to” what Baldwin censured as “sentimental protest fiction” (47).1 Indeed, Uncle Tom’s Children reveals the groundwork for Wright’s forthcoming existentialism to be an awareness, appreciation, and application of dignitarian basics, which can impel the individual agent, however sporadically and however fleetingly, to rise above the unthinking state of primordial being. At another level, “Down by the Riverside” builds on the foundations laid by “Big Boy Leaves Home,” further increasing its significance beyond that of “Silt” as an interpretational vehicle. “When one views the story as a whole, it seems reasonably apparent that Big Boy’s supposed regeneration is incomplete,” remarks P. Jay Delmar. Morrison “has learned absolutely nothing about himself from his experience, except perhaps that he hates whites more passionately than he did before the encounter at Harvey’s Pond. He has not comprehended his own impulsiveness; he has not seen that his pride in his physical power is not to be depended upon” (5). By tracing Morrison’s thoughts, as undertaken in the previous chapter of the present study, however, thoughts that testify to a growing confidence in reflection rather than perception, and a calculative reflection at that, the reader can appreciate how Big Boy’s experiences demand his maturation: the teenager has begun inching closer to the man. Thereafter, in the interstice between the first two tales in Uncle Tom’s Children, a big boy in the guise of Morrison becomes a man in the guise of Mann, the protagonist of “Down by the Riverside.” Mann, whose first name is intentionally withheld from the narrative, is an African-American sharecropper. Unlike the select, majoritarian characters that dominate the later novels of Henry James—works in which James, a cosmopolite of his own manufacture, cannot help but reveal the extent of his voluntary expatriation: “apart from his correct, upper middle-class English way of living, there was his deep reverence for England and for English things, and his satirical regard, sometimes bland, often sharp, of his own countrymen” (Francis MacManus 102)— Wright’s protagonist in “Down by the Riverside” is a generic man of the minoritarian people. While the populace in this violent and intense tale face a sudden catastrophe, most of them, as minoritarians, have lived with severe and ever-­ present sociopolitical dangers too; and Mann’s

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responses to the moral choices he must make combine the reflective and the perceptive. At least in part, as the surname Mann adumbrates, these responses express Wright’s underlying reciprocity with a contemporary whose influence Wright scholarship seldom cites: Thomas Mann (1875–1955). “No writer wants to feel that she inhabits an intellectual ghetto,” asserts Marilyn Nelson in “Owning the Masters” (1995). But Aframerican writers do occupy an unusually cluttered landscape since they must pay attention to not one but two literary traditions. While honoring the works of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Sterling A.  Brown, Robert Hayden, and Gwendolyn Brooks, they must also honor those of the old dead white guys. We are heirs to an alternate tradition, heirs to slave narratives, spirituals, great oratory, jazz, and blues, and the once enslaved are heirs to the masters, too. (206; emphasis added)

That feeling acknowledges a reflective need. Owning each tradition amounts to mastering the Western as well as the African-American touchstones of literature. Such ownership “gives us a way to escape the merely personal, puts us in dialogue with great thoughts of the past” (209). Although the sociopolitical differences between Henry James’s debonair Chad Newsome in The Ambassadors and Upton Sinclair’s Stanislova Jurgis in The Jungle would have struck Wright as both stark and malodorous, such comparisons did not dull Wright’s aesthetic discernment. “During Wright’s Chicago years with the Communists,” as Robert Philipson relates, “the friends most influential in guiding him toward literary models were […] non-Communist progressives,” who “encouraged Wright in his reading of Henry James, E. E. Cummings, Gertrude Stein, Joyce, Eliot, and Faulkner” (120). Jerry W.  Ward and Robert J.  Butler chronicle how “Joyce Gourfain, a friend Wright had met in the Communist Party, introduced Wright to James’s The Art of the Novel when he was living in Chicago in 1934” (205). African-American poet Margaret Walker befriended Wright during this period as well. “After Mencken’s works, if there were two literary books that were Wright’s Bible,” she recalls, “they were Henry James’s Collected Prefaces on the Art of the Novel and Joseph Warren Beach’s Twentieth Century Novel” (75). These exemplars were, as Philipson remarks, “a far cry from proletkult” (120). In fact, as Walker believes, “it must have been James who first interested Wright in the long short story or the short novel, which he correctly called by the Italian name, the novella” (75). In Richard Wright: Books &

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Writers (1990), Michel Fabre catalogues seven volumes by James (79–80) in Wright’s library: The Ambassadors (bought after 1940), The American (bought after 1940), The Art of the Novel, Critical Prefaces (an edition from 1947), The Portrait of a Lady (library stamped for 1936), The Tragic Muse (an edition from 1948), The Two Magics; The Turn of the Screw; Covering End (an edition from 1948; acquired before 1940), and The Wings of the Dove (an edition from 1946). “When Wright wrote his first short stories around 1932–34,” as Fabre documents, “he noted that he took his cue from Henry James, especially from the technique of The Awkward Age so that his dialogue ‘should carry as heavy a burden of reference possible,’” and “Wright was fond of discussing The Portrait of a Lady, Daisy Miller, and Roderick Hudson with Joyce Gourfain around 1935–37 in Chicago” (80). Thus, “to relate Wright to naturalism and proletarian fiction,” as Keneth Kinnamon appreciates in The Emergence of Richard Wright: A Study in Literature and Society (1972), “is not to deny other relationships.” If Wright “read Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis as a youth in Memphis, he was soon also reading Dostoevsky, Conrad, James, Sherwood Anderson, Stein, Hemingway, Joyce, Proust, and others.” The issue “is not that Wright’s literary technique is as complex as that of most of these writers, for it is not, but neither is it limited to a pedestrian naturalism” (160).2 Wright gleaned the principle of the dramatic present from European writers such as Conrad, James, and Mann. “Henry James brought this principle to its highest point of perfection,” relates Wright. “In order to show the character’s past life and still maintain that illusion of the present,” James and likeminded contemporaries “introduced the principle of foreshortening, which they borrowed from painting, the stage, music” (qtd. in Fabre [1990] 20). “By which writers have you been influenced?” Hans de Vaal would ask Wright in 1953. “In the first place by the pre-revolutionary Russians,” he replied. “Then Flaubert, Maupassant, Kafka, Gide, Proust, Sartre, Camus, Thomas Mann, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, George Moore, Sherwood Anderson, and Theodore Dreiser” (163). As his creative writing evinces, and as his study titled Schopenhauer (1938) makes plain, Thomas Mann was steeped in philosophy. “The conceptual framework” for Thomas Mann’s study, as Charlotte Nolte summarizes, “derives from [his] engagement with three kinds of intellectual concern: philosophy, myth, and modern psychology” (12). In Schopenhauer, “Mann links Schopenhauer’s philosophy of will to Kant and Plato,” emphasizing “the basic structure of

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Kant’s philosophy, which he derives from Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, which compares Plato’s concept of ideas with Kant’s ‘Ding an sich,’ the thing itself.” In fine, avers Nolte, “whatever name is given to the noumenon—idea, thing in itself, or will—and whatever the marginal differences between those concepts may be, the philosophies of Plato, Kant and Schopenhauer have in common that they make the division into ideas (noumena) and phenomena” (14). Reference to Edwin Berry Burgum’s “The Art of Richard Wright’s Short Stories” (1944) further tightens the ties between Wright and Thomas Mann. “For Thomas Mann,” writes Burgum, “sin and suffering, through the violence of war, become therapeutic devices of purgation by means of which we automatically recover our lost perception of the virtuous life. As in Dostoievsky, the act of violence automatically sets up its opposite; a different consciousness is created spontaneously by the mere course of events” (255).3 Both Fyodor Dostoevsky and Thomas Mann offer protagonists whose ideas and thoughts evolve under sociopolitical pressure, and these fictional characters struck a chord with Wright, an author who considered continued learning a prerequisite. In 1940, when Wright briefly revisited the Mississippi of his birth, as Fabre documents in The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright (1973), “the sharecroppers gazed admiringly as he filled out the insurance forms and encouraged their timid children to say hello to him, and the wives were awed by his erudition” (41). Wright learned much about fictional and nonfictional character development from Dostoevsky and Thomas Mann. “The reciprocity between developing events and the changing personality involves more than the emergence of different orders of intuition,” explains Burgum. “Part of the reciprocity is between the individual’s reason and his emotions. The process, thus conceived, assumes the emerging control of the consciousness, both over one’s emotions and the external event” (255). The minoritarian characters of Wright’s creation often suffer both mentally and physically. This suffering speaks at once of the minoritarian as an individual and of the totality of minoritarian connections both within and without that social group. “Down by the Riverside” speaks about character development, about individual and communal life, about human lives and choices and emotions, but does so in a more direct, less rarefied, and more encompassing manner than James’s The Ambassadors does. In these respects, Wright’s art is more akin to Dostoevsky’s and Mann’s than to James’s, the

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protagonist Mann more human than Mrs. Newsome and Lewis Lambert Strether. “Down by the Riverside” accommodates, on the one hand, the hopes Martha C. Nussbaum airs for combined philosophical and literary interrogations of “how the perception of particularity is connected with an openness to surprise” (“PE” 257). Flooding along the Mississippi River, or Old Man, forcibly undercuts the isolation of local people of the Newsome kind, individuals such as the postmaster Henry Heartfield and his family, the personnel in charge of the relief effort, and the medical staff at the Red Cross Hospital, who (as we shall see) generally hold firm to broad and abstract doctrines, people for whom “these principles, the court of last appeal in practical reason, even govern what they may see and consider relevant in the new” (“PE” 259; emphasis original). Just as the almost unbounded Old Man forces majoritarians as well as minoritarians to face perceptive surprises, Mann’s thoughts and actions offer non-­ reductive challenges to the stereotypes imposed on minoritarians by their majoritarian counterparts. “Down by the Riverside” accommodates, on the other hand, Wright’s testimonial experience. On one occasion, as Wright recalls about his childhood in Black Boy, “inability to pay rent forced [the family] to move into a house perched atop high logs in a section of the town where flood waters came. My brother and I had great fun running up and down the tall, shaky steps” (73). As Howard writes, “growing up in the Mississippi Delta, Richard Wright must have observed flooding and heard stories and legends about floods all his young life” (44). Such legends draw on a recorded history of flooding along the river that dates to 1543, when Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto encountered inundation near the present-day Memphis, Tennessee. More immediately for Wright, his own parents had endured the Mississippi River flood of February to June 1908, a particularly challenging episode because Ella was pregnant with Richard at that time. Yet, while Wright drew on such immersed situational perceptions for “Down by the Riverside,” his calculated literary response addresses general rather than particular issues. In answer to the long-term and widespread fears elicited by repeated inundations across the Mississippi floodplain during the opening two decades of the twentieth century, the Army Corps of Engineers undertook what Robyn Spencer describes as “unprecedented levee-fortifying activity”; and by 1927, the authorities “boasted that man had triumphed over nature” (170).4 New and improved levees protected over a thousand downstream miles from Cairo, Illinois,

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to the Gulf Coast. “For the length of that levee line the great earthworks seemed an impregnable fortress, towering two and three stories above the flat delta land” (175), writes John M. Barry. The Mississippi River Commission had pride and confidence in them. Indeed, that year, even while threatening clouds formed over much of the drainage basin of the Mississippi River, General Edgar Jadwin, new chief of the Army Corps of Engineers, had for the first time officially stated in his annual report that the levees were finally in condition “to prevent the destructive effect of floods.” (175)

Setting this unprecedented assurance on record, however, stoked a governmental tendency toward overconfidence, hubris that most sharecroppers did not share. Unlike government officials, who tended to live and work in urban landscapes that did not border the river, these laborers looked out over the Old Man, and that prospect never overlooked Him. In “The Dry Salvages” from Four Quartets (1944), T. S. Eliot recalled his childhood in St. Louis, Missouri, a city sited close to the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers—and he too appreciated the Old Man: I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable, Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier; Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce; Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges. The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten By the dwellers in cities—ever, however, implacable, Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting. (1.1–10)

The Old Man, attesting to its implacability, soon drowned the buoyant official mood of 1927. “In April—undaunted by mere man-made proclamations and saturated by unusually heavy rains earlier in the season—the Mississippi River began to break through the surrounding levees.” The first breach occurred at Mound Landing, Bolivar County, Mississippi. Inundation was soon widespread. “The Mississippi’s raging waters shattered the levees in no less than 145 places,” as Spencer records, “leaving 170 counties in Illinois, Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana submerged and forcing over 700,000 people to flee their homes” (170). The duration of the flood, which did not recede

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until the end of May, but more especially its scale, drew local, national, and international attention. The Great Mississippi River Flood, so named as a disaster of almost biblical proportions, seemed to enforce a leveling down of social differences, on the one hand, and appeared to bespeak the ultimate moral bedrock or the standard of God (with the Old Man as bringer of life and death), on the other. “I decided to use a flood to show the relationship between the two races in the South in a time of general tragedy” (15), recounts Wright in “How Uncle Tom’s Children Grew,” a period during which social consciousness (or a lack of it) came to the fore. To a limited extent, the flood did level the social playing field, with this act of nature “forcing black agricultural laborers and [white] planters alike to flee the self-contained plantation world” (Spencer 171). Furthermore, as Howard chronicles, black leaders “successfully influenced the Coolidge administration to appoint a Colored Advisory Commission on the flood which they hoped would not only gain aid for the refugees, most of whom were black, but also convince the federal government to invest enough money in the rebuilding of the South to enable black workers to become independent.” Robert Moton, one of Booker T.  Washington’s protégés and successor to Washington as principal of Tuskegee Institute, led the commission. As Howard notes, the existence, aims, and efforts of this body fostered interest from the African-American press, which “publish[ed] many articles that portrayed the special plight of black flood victims and sought to show the world that their suffering stemmed not only from natural catastrophe but from the Southern social system and its labor practices as well” (45). Their plight was special because, as statistics testified, social asymmetries persisted. “The documented results of [the committee’s] efforts,” as Howard adduces, “provide us with invaluable social and historical information about life in the Mississippi Delta as well as an accurate description of the bitter experience of black flood victims” (45). As Spencer details, African Americans, who accounted for seventy-five percent of the population in the delta lowlands, provided ninety-five percent of its agricultural labor force (171). “According to one estimate,” writes Howard in citing Jesse O.  Thomas’s “In the Path of the Flood” (August 1927), “of the 608,000 who lost their homes in the Great Flood of 1927, 555,000 were black” (61). The inundation ought to have enlightened everyone to the plight of victims and dependents; the dignity of individuals routinely

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denied the expression of their own agency ought to have been recognized; but this moral imperative remained significantly unmet. “We see clear connections,” as Terrence Tucker notes, “between the southern racial narrative and the southern landscape that Wright draws in his short story ‘Down by the Riverside’” (107). “By reporting on the bleakness of conditions in the South before the flood as well as on the hardships caused by it,” avers Howard, “the Commission hoped to elicit a generous response from the federal government to rebuild the flooded areas: it hoped the government would invest its money to improve the lives of the poor, not merely to restore the status quo” (58). Yet, while the flood altered the Mississippi landscape, the social conditions of the region remained practically untouched, as Walter White, then Assistant Secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), discovered in sounding out Mississippian sharecroppers. “A number of negroes vehemently and passionately said to me,” White later reported, “that they would rather be drowned in the flood than be forced to go back to the plantation from which they had come” (qtd. in Kenneth Robert Janken 82). Relief camps offered a prime example of the maintenance of antediluvian social structures. “The National Red Cross—aided by the Department of Commerce and the National Guard—undertook the formidable task of transforming miscellaneous strips of land into orderly and sanitary relief camps to house flood refugees,” documents Spencer, but “National Red Cross officials evinced little interest in the treatment of black laborers by Southern whites” (172). During the disaster, the stated role of the organization was flood relief not social reform. On the one hand, as Howard notes, “black refugee camps resembled concentration camps more than refuges from disaster: they were a convenient means of keeping sharecroppers in one place.” On the other hand, as Howard additionally notes, “the Red Cross, aided by its enforcement agency, the National Guard, was unofficially obliged to return the refugees to their employers after the flood receded” (51). To repeat Burgess’s warning to Tom in Wright’s “Silt”: “Two of the boys tried to run away this morning and dodge their debts, and I had to have the sheriff pick em up” (20). Individuals in positions of control almost invariably boasted majoritarian credentials. William Alexander Percy was a case in point. “In Greenville—one of the areas hardest hit by the flood—the mayor appointed William Alexander Percy, the son of a prestigious United States senator, who was also the richest planter in the county, to be chairman of the

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Greenville Flood Relief Committee and the local Red Cross” (Spencer 174). In Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter’s Son (1941), Percy recalls: At headquarters we slept three or four hours a night and, when not sleeping, lived in bedlam. It fell to my lot as chairman to make hundreds of decisions each day and the impossibility of investigation or second thought made every decision a snap judgment. Of necessity I became a dictator, and because the Red Cross controlled the food supplies and transportation I could enforce my orders. The responsibility didn’t daunt me, but the consciousness that my judgments were often wrong was a continuing nightmare. If I had to be a despot I was very anxious to be a beneficent one. (253)

This benevolent dictator enforced minoritarian conscription: “Black men were forced to join labor organizations at the set wage of one dollar; anyone who earned more than this sum became ineligible to receive food for his family” (Spencer 174). Philosopher F. M. Kamm’s principle of permissible harm classes such conscription, a term significant through its absence from Percy’s Lanterns on the Levee, as impermissible subordination, and Percy unwittingly acknowledges this impermissibility through discursive evasion. Kamm argues that the distinction between impermissible and permissible harm may well correspond to the difference between subordination and substitution; in turn, the latter distinction concerns important moral questions about agents and their status. The permissiveness of James’s Strether in The Ambassadors, a characteristic that Strether himself deems intuitively acceptable, is a form of substitution rather than subordination. As philosopher Shelly Kagan remarks, Kamm “confessedly has little to say about” the difference between subordination and substitution, so Kagan “elaborate[s], I hope sympathetically and accurately, on her behalf” (158). Kagan’s elaboration is relevant to the present discussion because Wright also has something to say about this distinction, as “Down by the Riverside” testifies. The paradigmatic example of subordination is slavery: “We subordinate one person to another,” as Kagan argues in a Kantian tenor, “treating the subordinate as a mere means to meeting the interests of the slave owner, the ‘superior’” (158). In “Down by the Riverside,” Mann “had heard that the white folks were threatening to conscript all Negroes they could lay their hands on to pile sand- and cement-bags on the levee” (64). Mann, as his use of the term threatening implies, effectively anticipates

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subordination rather than substitution. “They done put ever n****r they could fin on the levee,” Mann’s friend Bob tells him. “They drivin em like slaves. Ah heard they done killed two-three awready whut tried t run erway” (69). What was officially called “refugee labor” was tantamount to slave labor; and some deaths occurred during the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927, as Spencer confirms, because “not all black people acquiesced” (174). Partly in response to such resistance, the authorities felt constrained to bolster the number of levee-relief workers by subordinating inmates (of whatever ethnic background) from facilities such as Parchman Farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary. Kagan cannot be more scathing in assessing such authoritarian methods. “Some ways—perhaps most ways—in which someone might be killed so as to save others will involve this kind of subordination. And as such they will be unacceptable” (158–59; emphasis original). In short, he concludes, “perhaps those acts that are intuitively unacceptable can be shown to involve subordination, while those that are intuitively acceptable involve mere substitution” (159). Concerning the serious floods occasioned by the Mississippi River, such as the catastrophic event of 1927, while the Old Man undercut the primacy of majoritarians, they strove to maintain or reimpose that status on two fronts: from the unfolding natural disaster and from the possibility of what majoritarians would have deemed the social calamity of racial equivalence. In pursuing a theory of perceptive equilibrium that attunes literary theory to ethical theory, Nussbaum acknowledges the pertinence of rationality to the demand for social equality in proposing how “it would be an especially useful exercise, for example, to work through the contemporary economic literature on rationality, in which there is much pertinent debate about commensurability, about ordering, about universality” (“PE” 257). Moreover, while Derek Parfit would agree with Nussbaum that people tend to react more readily, less reflectively, and more emotionally to sudden or extreme moral quandaries than to quandaries that are expected or moderate, he would not relegate the universality of reasons and rationality to that of feelings and perceptivity. While desire-based views have been, and remain, deeply influential, Parfit classifies them as subjective theories and argues persuasively that they are profoundly misguided. According to subjectivists, he explains, “instrumental reasons get their force, not from some telic reason, but from some telic desire or aim. We can have desire-based reasons to have some desire, and we can have long chains of instrumental desire-based

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reasons and desires. But at the beginning of any of these chains […] there must always be some desire or aim that we have no such reason to have” (OWM 1:91; emphasis original). What is more, We cannot defensibly claim that such desires or aims give us reasons. I would have no reason to thrust my hand into the fire. We would have no reason to hit our howling baby, or to waste our lives, or to try achieve countless other bad or worthless aims. So subjective theories are built on sand. Since all subject-given reasons would have to get their normative force from some desire or aim that we have no such reason to have, and such desires or aims cannot be defensibly claimed to give us any reasons, we cannot be defensibly claimed to have any subject-given reasons. We cannot have any such reasons to have any desire or aim, or to act in any way. (OWM 1:91)

The theory of perceptive equilibrium proposed by Nussbaum rests on “sand” (or, in the context of Richard Wright’s philosophical groundwork, “silt”). Parfit proposes, instead, an objective theory, setting up and then navigating a decision table (the sort of diagram that Ludwig Wittgenstein would have appreciated) to choose between the conflicting options of normativity (see Fig. 4.1). Samuel Scheffler provides a concise reading of Parfit’s conclusions from this exercise. “We do not detect the presence of normative properties like rightness or rationality as a result of being causally affected by them,” he explains. “Instead, we understand normative truths in something like the way we understand mathematical or logical truths. Indeed, Parfit argues, mathematical and logical reasoning themselves involve recognizing and responding to normative truths about what we have reason to believe. For example, we recognize that the truth of p and if p then q gives us conclusive reason to believe that q. Just as there are truths about what we have reason to believe, Parfit insists, so too there are truths about what we have reason to do” (xxv). Thus, “in the moral case,” as Scheffler observes, Parfit’s “aim is to demonstrate that certain putatively opposing views may actually converge, so that apparent disagreement among them evaporates” (xxvi). The Parfitian search for optimific principles asks what an agent could rationally agree to in situations where one course of action will burden that agent alone, while the alternative course of action will burden other agents. Parfit’s investigative method employs imaginary situations. He

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Are normative claims intended or believed to state truths?

Yes

No Non-Cognitivism

Semi-Cognitivism

Are there any normative truths?

Yes Cognitivism

No Nihilism

Are these truths irreducibly normative?

Yes Non-Naturalist Cognitivism

No Are the concepts and claims with which we state such truths irreducibly normative?

Yes Non-Analytical Naturalism

No Analytical Naturalism (OWM 2:263)

Fig. 4.1  Conflicting options of normativity

believes that this approach “can help to clarify the issues that are at stake in complex moral choices and enable us to make progress in moral argument” (Scheffler xxxi). In this sense, then, Parfit and Nussbaum, in effect, concur. “The central procedural idea,” to repeat Nussbaum, “is that we work through the major alternative views about the good life, holding

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them up, in each case, against our own experience and our intuitions” (“PE” 245). Furthermore, as if agreeing with Nussbaum’s call to “confront reigning models of political and economic rationality” (“PE” 263), Parfit employs two genres of thought experiment introduced to twentieth-century philosophy for weighing moral options: the theory of games of strategy (or game theory), as used in Reasons and Persons, and trolley problems, as used in On What Matters. As Nussbaum notes, while sharing aspects of the aesthetics of recreational games, literature casts its aesthetic net wider than the ludic. “One of the things that makes literature deeper and more central for us than a complex game, deeper even than those games, for example chess and tennis, that move us to wonder by their complex beauty, is that it speaks […] about us, about our lives and choices and emotions, about our social existence and the totality of our connections” (“PE” 243–44). Nonetheless, as the terms choices, social existence, and totality of our connections connote, Nussbaum places situational options and the selective preferences of agents at the core of both moral philosophy and serious literature. Human interconnectedness amounts to the problematics of coordination.5 In these strategic situations, agents must make choices in the knowledge that the same options face other agents and that the outcome for each agent will result from the decisions of every agent. The four most frequently encountered coordination problems are the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the Stag Hunt, Chicken, and Deadlock. Agents choose either cooperation or defection in these daily situations. Many games present a broader range of behavioral choices, but game theory separates these options into a series of paired decisions. “Whether the outcome of a game is comic or tragic, fun or serious, fair or unfair,” as Steven J. Brams states in Biblical Games (1980), “it depends on individual choices” (6; emphasis original). Each logically minded player in a self-interested situation must anticipate the other players’ choices and pick a strategy according to the prospects of preference-satisfaction. Game theory and trolley problems illuminate this aspect of social existence, and this methodological suitability undermines Nussbaum’s assertion that Kantianism and Utilitarianism “were so inhospitable to any possible relation with imaginative literature that dialogue was cut off from the side of ethics” (“PE” 244). Kantianism and Utilitarianism do assume “that the value of all choices and actions is to be assessed in terms of a certain sort of consequence that they tend to promote” (“PE” 245), as Nussbaum states, but the tools

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introduced to twentieth-century philosophy for weighing moral options can be applied in literary interpretation too. This methodological fit is auspicious because literature has, as Nussbaum herself relates, “a distinctive speaking role to play” in ethical as well as sociopolitical debates. For Nussbaum, while “a first part of [this contribution] might be to confront reigning models of political and economic rationality” (“PE” 263), imaginative literature more broadly presents characters confronted by problems of moral justification: not only individuals who face burdening themselves or others but also individuals who must choose which groups to burden. “As Aristotle observed,” remarks Nussbaum, literature “is deep, and conducive to our inquiry about how to live, because it does not simply (as history does) record that this or that event happened; it searches for patterns of possibility—of choice, and circumstance, and the interaction between choice and circumstance—that turn up in human lives with such a persistence that they must be regarded as our possibilities” (“PE” 244). Both game theory and trolley problems present analyzable situations in which individuals face conflicting choices. While game theory concerns the choices faced by multiple agents, trolley problems concern the choices faced by individual agents; trolley problems often equate to game-­theoretic problems in which the response of one agent to a situation, which involves two separate agencies, produce a known, unalterable result; and whereas game theory concerns self-interest in general, trolley problems concern moral choices in particular. Game theory has elicited excellent work from literary scholars in recent years, most notably the separate contributions of Brams, especially in Biblical Games, Theory of Moves (1994), and Game Theory and the Humanities (2011), and Peter Swirski, especially in Of Literature and Knowledge (2007) and Literature, Analytically Speaking (2010). A game-theoretic reading of “Big Boy Leaves Home” would at once name the synergistic mutualism of the African-American community in trying to help Big Boy Morrison a Rousseauian Stag Hunt and quantify that response as rationally yet morally commendable. Modern mathematics has translated Rousseau’s description in his Discourse on Inequality (1755), or his Second Discourse, of the hunt for prize game into the Stag Hunt. Rousseau reasons that personal gain through cooperation for the common good became the strategic reaction of natural (or savage) humans as they evolved from their primitive condition in “the pure state of nature” (78). “If it was a matter of hunting a deer, everyone well realized that he must remain faithfully at his post” (111). For Rousseau, Stag

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Hunts helped savage humans “come gradually together” (113); “relationships became more extensive and bonds tightened” (113); and owing to core division (the sharing out of proceeds from a joint venture), “it was no longer possible for anyone to be refused consideration” (114). Put succinctly, the synergistic mutualism of “group hunting,” as John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry summarize, “is more efficient than hunting alone” (261). The Stag Hunt, as a nonzero-sum dilemma that does not meet the minimax theorem, is the sort of strategic game endorsed by President William J. Clinton.6 “As societies grow more and more connected, and we become more interdependent, one with the other,” states Clinton, “we are forced to find more and more non-zero-sum solutions. That is, ways in which we can all win” (1875). Rousseau’s comprehension of this social dynamic, however, runs deeper than Clinton’s endorsement does. In addition to an appreciation of core division, Rousseau understands the contingent reciprocity of the Stag Hunt: the patience required undermines the individual hunter’s commitment to the group. Accordingly, “if a hare happened to pass within the reach of one of them,” as Rousseau remarks, “we cannot doubt that he would have gone off in pursuit of it without scruple and, having caught his own prey, he would have cared very little about having caused his companions to lose theirs” (111). Part of this defection concerns a bias not only toward the temporally, but also toward the physically, near: the hare is present and close by, inviting capture, while the stag is absent and thereby distant, emphasizing the hare’s presence. If all participants cooperate in remaining unswayed by this bias, as happens within Morrison’s community in “Big Boy Leaves Home,” then the ultimate outcome transpires. If one participant defects in erring toward this bias, then that player gains the second highest payoff, with his coevals receiving the lowest outcome. If everyone defects, then each player seeks a hare; the increased demand for hares makes their capture more onerous than for a single hunter; and this increased effort promises each participant the penultimate payoff. One player’s cooperation, or loyalty to group action, when his coevals defect en masse, secures that participant the lowest outcome, while the other players receive the second-highest score. For the game-theoretic model of the Stag Hunt, where C stands for cooperation and D for defection, the mathematical formula that expresses these descending outcomes is CC  >  DC  >  DD  >  CD.  Table  4.1 shows the related mathematical payoff matrix.

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Table 4.1  Possible outcomes to the Stag Hunt GROUP MINUS INDIVIDUAL Hunt Stag (C) INDIVIDUAL

Hunt Hare (D)

3

Hunt Stag (C) 3 Hunt Hare (D)

2 0

0 2

1 1

Another way of expressing these diminishing outcomes, as preferred by social psychologists, sees the reward for mutual cooperation (R) bettering the temptation of unilateral defection (T), the temptation of unilateral defection bettering the punishment for mutual defection (P), and the punishment for mutual defection bettering the sucker outcome for unilateral cooperation (S)—“so long, sucker” (159), in the words of Princeton game theorists, and as documented by one of them, Martin Shubik, expressing the defector’s cynical relief at his opponent’s naivety.7 The mathematical formula that summarizes the descending outcomes in this nomenclature is R > T > P > S. Any defection from the African-American community in “Big Boy Leaves Home,” with either single or multiple informers testifying to Morrison’s hideout, would have resulted in the fugitive’s lynching. The two Nash equilibria for the Stag Hunt are mutual cooperation and mutual defection. John Nash’s concept of coordinative equilibrium, explain Michael S. Alvard and David A. Nolin, “describes a combination of players’ strategies that are best against one another.” When a coordination problem reaches a “Nash equilibrium, no player can do better by changing his or her decision unilaterally” (534). When considering “the two-person zero-sum case,” concludes Nash, “the ‘main [minimax] theorem’ and the existence of an equilibrium point are equivalent” (49). This equivalence cannot hold for nonzero-sum games because they do not meet the minimax theorem. Pareto optimality measures efficiency: a Pareto optimum arises when no other outcome makes at least one player better off and no player worse off. “A Pareto optimum,” add Alvard and Nolin, “can be conceived of as the set of strategies that maximizes group benefit.” In short, “coordination is preferred in many games, but some types of coordination are better than others.” The Nash equilibria for the Stag Hunt “are Pareto-ranked,” as Alvard and Nolin explain: “both players prefer mutual cooperation to mutual defection” (534).

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Importantly, as Alvard and Nolin relate, “experimental evidence shows that even in coordination games where there is only one Pareto-dominant Nash equilibrium, players do not always converge; groups can get ‘stuck’ at a nonoptimal equilibrium” (536). Mutual cooperation is payoff dominant, while mutual defection is risk dominant. Ironically, the stable solutions to the Stag Hunt make this dilemma unstable. Common interest does not guarantee cooperation: successful collaboration requires not only mutual beliefs but also trust. “In these sorts of games, while mutual cooperation is preferred, cooperating while a partner defects is worse than mutual defection” (534). Cooperation involves risks that depend on the degrees of trust between players. The lynchers in Wright’s “Big Boy Leaves Home” acknowledge at once the synergistic mutualism, shared beliefs, and communal loyalty of African Americans, even though these racists fail to recognize the rationality that underpins such attributes: “These n****rs stick together; they don never tell on each other” (52); and this majoritarian failure is a common theme of Uncle Tom’s Children. Literary portrayals of cognition demand greater critical attention than scholars of literature have heretofore provided, and game theory answers this call with its ability to model coordination problems. Trolley problems offer related insights, but unlike game theory have failed to garner interest among literary academics, owing in part to their recent introduction to philosophy. Whereas the rational conundrums raised by coordination problems were first highlighted by John von Neumann in “Zur Theorie der Gesellschaftsspiele” in 1928, and then underwritten by von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944), the moral conundrums raised by trolley problems were not introduced to philosophy (or epistemology in general) until Philippa Foot wrote of “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect” in 1967.8 Foot’s titular starting point for her essay was timely, the Oxford Review publishing the piece at the height of the “swinging sixties,” when the newly available contraceptive pill was emancipating sexual expression and bringing the subject of sex, and its consequences (both physical and mental), to the social fore. In the same year as Foot’s publication, the Abortion Act came into force in England, Scotland, and Wales, legalizing abortions when certain circumstances pertained, but raising questions about circumstantial ethics. “One of the reasons why most of us feel puzzled about the problem of abortion,” states Foot, “is that we want, and do not want, to allow to the unborn child the rights that belong to adults and children.” Undoubtedly, “this is the deepest source of our dilemma, but it is not the

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only one.” More immediately, “we are also confused about the general question of what we may and may not do where the interests of human beings conflict” (“PADDE” 19)—Foot’s addendum echoing the sort of situations, and the type of rhetoric, associated with game-theoretic problems of coordination. Foot argues that while strong intuitions inform many responses to this coordinative puzzle, the underlying principles remain difficult to validate, as with the “‘doctrine of the double effect’ which is invoked by Catholics in support of their views on abortion but supposed by them to apply elsewhere” (“PADDE” 19). In fact, “this principle has seemed to some non-­ Catholics as well as to Catholics to stand as the only defence against decisions on other issues that are quite unacceptable,” and “it will help us in our difficulty about abortion if this conflict can be resolved.” Foot begins this task by remarking that the doctrine of the double effect appeals to the distinction between direct intention—what an agent purposefully intends—and indirect intention—what that agent foresees will result from that agent’s purposeful intent. With direct intention, an agent expects both the thing aimed at as an end and the thing aimed at as a means to that end. “The latter may be regretted,” explains Foot, “but nevertheless desired for the sake of the end, as we may intend to keep dangerous lunatics confined for the sake of our safety.” With indirect intention, an agent foresees a particular consequence of voluntary action, but this outcome was “neither the end at which he is aiming nor the means to this end” (“PADDE” 20). Jeremy Bentham introduced the concepts of “direct intentionality” (94) and what he called “oblique intentionality” (94) in An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1780), and Foot acknowledges this derivation, deploying the terms indirect and oblique interchangeably. Having established this terminology, Foot turns to the moral difficulties engendered by specific circumstances pertaining to the problem stated in the title of her paper: the Catholic invocation of the doctrine of the double effect in cases of fetal death. Under Catholicism, abortion is acceptable under some circumstances but otherwise intolerable. “It is said for instance that the operation of hysterectomy involves the death of the fetus as the foreseen but not strictly or directly intended consequence of the surgeon’s act, while other operations kill the child and count as the direct intention of taking an innocent life.” According to Catholicism, while the first instance is acceptable, the second instance is unacceptable. This “distinction has evoked particularly bitter reactions on the part of

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non-Catholics. If you are permitted to bring about the death of the child, what does it matter how it is done?” (“PADDE” 20). Foot’s first observation about this quandary “is that no one is suggesting that it does not matter what you bring about as long as you merely foresee and do not strictly intend the evil that follows.” What those committed to the doctrine of the double effect argue is “that sometimes it makes a difference to the permissibility of an action involving harm to others that this harm, although foreseen, is not part of the agent’s direct intention” (“PADDE” 22; emphasis original). Assessing the doctrine further, Foot compares two imaginary cases, applying the double effect to the resulting conundrum. “Given that philosophical hypotheses are generally ̇ ̇ regarded as being a priori claims,” remarks Ilhan Inan, “thought experiments have been widely utilized as instruments to put them to test” (581). In Foot’s first imaginary case, “suppose that a judge or magistrate is faced with rioters demanding that a culprit be found for a certain crime and threatening otherwise to take their own bloody revenge on a particular section of the community. The real culprit being unknown, the judge sees himself as able to prevent the bloodshed only by framing some innocent person and having him executed.” In Foot’s second imaginary case, “the driver of a runaway tram […] can only steer from one narrow track on to another; five men are working on one track and one man on the other; anyone on the track he enters is bound to be killed.” These are structurally comparable cases, but that comparison raises a conundrum, one related to the doctrine of the double effect: “why we should say, without hesitation, that the driver should steer for the less occupied track, while most of us would be appalled at the idea that the innocent man could be framed” (“PADDE” 23). The distinction between direct and indirect intention supplies Foot’s immediate solution: “insisting that it is one thing to steer towards someone foreseeing that you will kill him and another to aim at his death as part of your plan” (“PADDE” 23). For some time, “I thought that [such] arguments in favor of the doctrine of the double effect were conclusive, but I now believe,” she admits, “that the conflict should be solved in another way.” The reasoning “that we should follow is that the strength of the doctrine seems to lie in the distinction it makes between what we do (equated with direct intention) and what we allow (thought of as obliquely intended).” This reasoning is sound, however, only after accepting that “the distinction between what one does and what one allows to happen is not the same as that between direct and oblique intention.” The difference is clear if one considers deliberately allowing something to happen:

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“aiming at it either for its own sake or as part of one’s plan for obtaining something else” (“PADDE” 25; emphasis original). For example, an agent might want another agent dead and might deliberately allow that other agent to die. Such considerations raise the related distinction between positive and negative duties. A positive duty involves active obligation, such as caring for one’s children. A negative duty involves inactive obligation, such as refraining from murder. Foot finds it both useful and acceptable, however, to extend the concept of positive duty to include acts of charity: “These are owed only in a rather loose sense, and some acts of charity could hardly be said to be owed at all, so I am not following ordinary usage at this point” (“PADDE” 27; emphasis original). Significantly, this extension to common usage recalls the deontological as well as the expectational side to the dignitarian imperative espoused by Immanuel Kant, with whose ideas Foot frequently engages. “Kant was perfectly right in saying that moral goodness was goodness of the will,” she avers in Natural Goodness (2001); “the idea of practical rationality is throughout a concept of this kind” (14).9 In the first of Foot’s imaginary cases, the judge “is weighing the duty of not inflicting injury against the duty of bringing aid. He wants to rescue the innocent people threatened with death but can do so only by inflicting injury himself” (“PADDE” 27–28). Even imposing the strictest duty of positive aid, with the judge unwilling to “kill the innocent person in order to stop the riots,” his task “still does not weigh as if a negative duty were involved” (“PADDE” 28). In the second of Foot’s imaginary cases, “the steering driver faces a conflict of negative duties,” because “it is his duty to avoid injuring five men and also his duty to avoid injuring one. In the circumstances he is not able to avoid both, and it seems clear that he should do the least injury he can” (“PADDE” 27). Utilitarianism supports this response: the best outcome involves the greatest net sum of benefits minus burdens. “Since one does not in general have the same duty to help people as to refrain from injuring them,” reasons Foot, “it is not possible to argue to a conclusion about what [the judge] should do from the steering driver case.” Hence, “it is not inconsistent of us to think that the driver must steer for the road on which only one man stands while the judge (or his equivalent) may not kill the innocent person in order to stop the riots” (“PADDE” 28; emphasis original). Foot concludes, therefore, “that the distinction between direct and oblique intention plays only a quite subsidiary role in determining what we say in these cases, while the distinction between avoiding injury and bringing aid is very important indeed” (“PADDE” 29).

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Foot’s thought experiment gave unwitting birth to the trolley problem. This parturition has provoked philosophical wrangling. While some philosophers find trolley problems useful, others deem them fallacious, and the disciplinary outfall seems to have contributed to the lack of interest garnered by these dilemmas from literary academics. For such a “disarmingly modest” philosopher, as William Grimes described Foot for The New York Times (9 October 2010), the subsequent explosion of interest in the trolley problem—“many of the world’s leading moral philosophers,” as Eric Rakowski notes in his Introduction to The Trolley Problem Mysteries (2016), “have weighed in over the last [forty] years” (4)—came as a somewhat disquieting surprise. The first moral philosopher to show concerted interest in the subject was Judith Jarvis Thomson in “Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem” (1976). Indeed, the intuitive moral difference between two structurally comparable situations, a form of comparative test that Thomson derives from Foot, enabled Thomson to define and explicitly name the generic trolley problem.10 Thomson begins her intervention with a scenario she calls Transplant. “David is a great transplant surgeon” (“KLD” 206), imagines Thomson. Five of his patients need new parts—one needs a heart, the others need, respectively, liver, stomach, spleen, and spinal cord—but all are of the same, relatively rare, blood-type. By chance, David learns of a healthy specimen with that very blood-type. David can take the healthy specimen’s parts, killing him, and install them in his patients, saving them. Or he can refrain from taking the healthy specimen’s parts, letting his patients die. (“KLD” 206)

On the one hand, avers Thomson, the ethics of this case appear obvious. “If David may not even choose to cut up one where five will thereby be saved, surely what people who say ‘Killing is worse than letting die’ mean by it must be right!” On the other hand, avers Thomson, “there is a lovely, nasty difficulty which confronts us at this point,” a problem that Foot’s disquisition on the double effect effectively introduced. “Foot says—and seems right to say—that it is permissible for Edward, in the following case, to kill” (“KLD” 206; emphasis original). In this instance, Edward is the driver of a trolley, whose brakes have just failed. On the track ahead of him are five people; the banks are so steep that they will not be able to get off the track in time. The track has a spur leading off to the right, and Edward can turn the trolley onto it. Unfortunately there is one person on

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the right-hand track. Edward can turn the trolley, killing the one; or he can refrain from turning the trolley, killing the five. (“KLD” 206)

If, as seems morally correct, killing is worse than letting die, “how is it that Edward may choose to turn that trolley?” asks Thomson. Even setting aside the distinction between killing and letting die, a moral difficulty still pertains: “why is it that Edward may turn that trolley to save his five, but David may not cut up his healthy specimen to save his five?” In naming the protagonist, Thomson settles that ambiguous aspect of Foot’s scenario in which the uncertainty of the article in the term “the driver” or “the surgeon” suggests both a and any, proposing at once a particular scenario and a general archetype, and Thomson names the result of her intervention “the trolley problem, in honor of Mrs. Foot’s example” (“KLD” 206). Cross Damon, effectively Richard Wright’s alter ego in The Outsider, can allow his head to loll tranquilly as the trolley in which he travels traverses Chicago (44), but trolley problems have left many philosophers either intrigued (Kagan, Parfit, and Thomson), disenchanted (Mary Midgely, Roger Scruton, and Allen W. Wood), or unsettled (Foot, Kamm, and Peter Unger). As Thomson appreciates, trolley problems suggest that the intuitive reactions of people to certain moral dilemmas, what Nussbaum would call their immersed perceptions in such situations, may diverge. Thomson hereby not only named “the trolley problem” but also developed Foot’s initial inquiry. Foot did draw some objections to the doctrine of the double effect; she argued that many people take the doctrine seriously despite persistent and justifiable objections; yet, if such objections invalidate that doctrine, how does one choose between conflicting directives in scenarios of similar moral importance? Foot’s scenarios in “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect,” as Thomson explains in “Kamm on the Trolley Problems” (2016), “suggested that the wanted explanation lies in the distinction between negative duties and positive duties” (114). The negative prevails over the complementary positive. The obligation to refrain from killing, for example, outweighs the obligation to save lives. In Thomson’s trolley problem from “Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem,” Edward does not face a “conflict between a positive duty to save five and a negative duty to refrain from killing one,” but “a conflict between a negative duty to refrain from killing five and a negative duty to refrain from killing one” (206).

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The consequences for philosophy of Thomson’s positive duty toward the philosophical, moral, and practical corollaries of Foot’s disquisition on moral double effects have been significant. “Almost singlehandedly at first, in clear, arresting prose,” relates Rakowski, “Thomson drew attention to Foot’s puzzles, modified her cases to make them more analytically useful, and punched holes in possible justifications for what she thought were sound intuitive responses to evocative scenarios” (3). Thomson names one such scenario Fat Man: George is on a footbridge over the trolley tracks. He knows trolleys, and can see that the one approaching the bridge is out of control. On the track back of the bridge there are five people; the banks are so steep that they will not be able to get off the track in time. George knows that the only way to stop an out-of-control trolley is to drop a very heavy weight into its path. But the only available, sufficiently heavy weight is a fat man, also watching the trolley from the footbridge. George can shove the fat man onto the track in the path of the trolley, killing the fat man; or he can refrain from doing this, letting the five die. Presumably George may not shove the fat man into the path of the trolley; he must let the five die. (“KLD” 207–8)

Thomson argues that “bringing a different threat to bear” (“KLD” 208) validates that assumption. In other words, introducing a new danger, as George would do in shoving the heavy man in front of the trolley, is morally more objectionable than the redirection of an existing danger, as George would do in diverting the trolley. “The traditional deontological principles concern your relation to an evil,” as philosopher Thomas Hurka notes in “Trolleys and Permissible Harm” (2016): “they say it’s more objectionable to cause than to allow an evil” (142). In certain circumstances, an action saves the lives of a number of people, killing fewer people in the process. This action is for the greater good. Otherwise, an event saves the lives of a number of people, but a causal means behind that event kills fewer people. Killing fewer people under these circumstances is unjustifiable. “The crucial question,” as Kagan concludes, “is whether the event that results in the killing of the one literally constitutes the saving [of a number of lives] or is merely a means to that saving” (156; emphasis original). “The trolley problem,” as Rakowski reiterates, “has […] proved a uniquely fascinating puzzle for moral philosophers for nearly forty years” (1), and as one of the major tools introduced to twentieth-century

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philosophy for gauging moral options and justifying moral decisions, this conundrum complements the other of these tools, game theory, which has already proved its hermeneutical worth to literary studies. Judged alongside this usefulness, and notwithstanding their recent introduction to philosophy, the nonexistent reaction to trolley problems among scholars of literature might be startling, but the mistrust of trolley problems in certain philosophical quarters helps to account for this silence. Rakowski addresses this mistrust by introducing related concerns. “The dominant approach to the trolley problem has been to vary the examples to see which of the candidate principles best match our intuitive reactions to the test cases and their variants, while themselves offering compelling expressions of our more fundamental moral beliefs.” In consequence, “examples proliferate, the contours of the justificatory problem shift, and the job of tailoring moral principles to fit the cases grows exponentially more complex” (2). With this proliferation, therefore, the cases become “further from everyday experience” (5). Wood, whose intervention in the debate is among the most caustic, offers a different criticism of trolley problems, which laments not their complexity but their reductive simplicity. “Most of the situations described in trolley problems are highly unlikely to occur in real life,” he rails, “and the situations are described in ways that are so impoverished as to be downright cartoonish” (“HEI” 69). What is more, “the deceptiveness in trolley problems is indirectly related to their cartoonishness,” this spuriousness partly consisting “in the fact that we are usually deprived of morally relevant facts that we would often have in real life, and often just as significantly, that we are required to stipulate that we are certain about some matters which in real life could never be certain.” In typical trolley problems, maintains Wood, “the circumstantial rights, claims and entitlements people would have in real life situations are put entirely out of action (ignored or stipulated away). In the process, an important range of considerations that are, should be, and in real life would be absolutely decisive in our moral thinking about these cases in the real world is systematically abstracted out” (“HEI” 70). Hence, the charts, decision tables, matrices, and track diagrams that game theorists and trolley problem proponents employ, such as those used in the present volume, prompt two responses. For supporters of mathematical incursions into philosophy, such as Parfit, these visual and structural aids help to convert lived experience into computational units. For detractors of mathematical incursions into philosophy, such as Wood,

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these visual and structural aids help computational units to pass for lived experience. Wood insists that the philosophical consequences of such passing are “utterly disastrous” (“HEI” 70). Trolley problems “do not represent the fundamental issues with which moral principles must deal.” If anything, “these kinds of problems mark the limits of the power of moral thought to deal with problems of human life. The kind of thinking they force on us rather constitutes the way we have to think about things precisely where our moral aspirations have essentially failed” (“HEI” 81). In defending trolley problems, philosopher and broadcaster David Edmonds acknowledges Wood’s misgivings, noting how “the indictment against trolleyology is that all its puzzles are improbable and, therefore, all of them are useless” (100). Indeed, while distancing Foot from trolley problems and such indictments, Midgely reinforces those condemnations. “Foot would have been dismayed by the burgeoning sub-genre that she spawned,” she informs Edmonds. “This trolley-problem industry is just one more depressing example of academic philosophers’ obsession with concentrating on selected, artificial examples so as to dodge the stress of looking at real issues” (qtd. in Edmonds 100). Midgely herself defies that obsession. In Evolution as a Religion (1985) and The Myths We Live By (2003), as Chris Bateman summarizes, “Midgely […] has consistently and cogently argued” how “the idea that our motives can be reduced in this way without losing vital aspects of the real situation is thoroughly misguided” (126). Wood halfheartedly reveals one of the major retorts he has received on the subject. Fans of trolley problems have suggested to me that these problems are intended to be philosophically useful because they enable us to abstract in quite precise ways from everyday situations, eliciting our intuitions about what is morally essential apart from the irrelevant complexities and ‘noise’ of real world situations that get in the way of our seeing clearly what these intuitions are. (“HEI” 82)

Philosophers are not creative writers. “Unlike a literary author” ̇ (581), agrees Inan in disagreeing the primary goal of the creator of a thought experiment is not to entertain the reader, nor is it to produce a form of written art—though achieving such qualities could be a plus. Just like a real scientific experiment conducted in the physical world, a thought experiment is typically designed to test a hypothesis and is therefore intended to function as an epistemic tool to expand our knowledge on a particular topic. (581)

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Wood “cannot accept” such arguments (“HEI” 82). He avers: Trolley problems seem to me to abstract not from what is irrelevant, but from what is morally vital about all the situations that most resemble them in real life. At the very least, trolley problems presuppose (rather than establish) that certain things are morally fundamental, and my own view is that these presuppositions are at least highly doubtful, probably perniciously false, and that trolley problems (or people’s responses to them) do nothing at all to support or confirm these presuppositions. Instead, they only provide a kind of illegitimate pseudo-support for them, as well as the opportunity to do moral philosophy in a manner that encourages us not to question them. (“HEI” 82)

With this argument, however, Wood unwittingly bolsters the invocation of classics from minor literature, those texts that delineate trolley problems involving fundamental moral issues, trolley problems that are far from cartoonish. A hermeneutical rejoinder insists, therefore, that minor literature, unlike recent moral philosophy, can present complex cases with trolleyproblem structures, cases that are usefully equatable to lived experience. This form of literature often concerns circumstantial rights, claims, and entitlements that have been ignored or stipulated away, and the consequences of disenfranchisement, as minoritarian authors repeatedly counsel, are utterly disastrous for humankind. Rakowski “suggests that we might be wise to adopt a more reformist approach to the trolley problem, elbowing aside at least some of our case-specific intuitions out of regard for more fundamental moral principles we think more surely are true” (6); and Parfit clearly undertakes such an exercise in engaging with Kantian principles. Crucially, then, while literary theorists can appreciate the doubts certain philosophers harbor about trolley problems, they can use Parfit’s reformist approach to these objections to both literary and philosophical advantage.

Notes 1. Wright wrote “I Choose Exile” (1949) for Ebony, but the magazine did not publish the piece, the editors being worried about the bleakness of Wright’s views concerning America and American racial politics. Wright redrafted “I Choose Exile” several times. The version used herein is the latest one, which Kent State University holds, and which dates to 1951. Reference to Wright’s essay is cited parenthetically hereafter as “ICE.” 2. The Emergence of Richard Wright is cited parenthetically hereafter as ERW.

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3. “The Art of Richard Wright’s Short Stories” is cited parenthetically hereafter as “ARWSS.” 4. Serious flooding of the Mississippi River had occurred during March to May 1912, April to May 1913, February to April 1916, and April to May 1922. 5. Kwasi Wiredu identifies a difference between Western and African philosophies regarding the ethics of human interrelations. “While Kant considers the categorical imperative as a law written in the nature of humans that emanates from a collaboration between reason and the will, and so views morality as being about the duty to do only what is good,” explains Dismas A. Masolo, “Wiredu views morality as a function of the relational nature of humans.” Wiredu’s relational approach to ethics appears, therefore, more game-theoretic than basic Kantianism does. In other words, as Masolo summarizes, “while Kant viewed social contexts only as the conditions in which the sense of moral duty was sharpened, Wiredu views the social condition of humanity as the causal context of moral awareness and the springboard for the categorical imperative” (68). 6. A nonzero-sum dilemma occurs when agents’ acquisitions or losses do not derive from the other agents; in other words, a gain or loss accrues in toto. The minimax theorem states that an agent must minimize the maximum left to the other agents, thereby maximizing his own minimum (or maximin). The minimax theorem, explain William G.  Forgang and Karl W. Einolf, “applies only to games where at least all but one player has a dominant strategy” (178). 7. The seeming tautology of “mutual cooperation” designates the players’ simultaneous choice of collaboration. 8. “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect” is cited parenthetically hereafter as “PADDE.” 9. To Foot, Kant “seems to have gone wrong, however, in thinking that an abstract idea of practical reason applicable to rational beings as such could take us all the way to anything like our own moral code” (Natural Goodness 14). Parfit would fundamentally disagree with Foot on this point. 10. “Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem” is cited parenthetically hereafter as “KLD.”

CHAPTER 5

Lifeboats

They are outsiders and they are going to know that they have these problems. They are going to be self-conscious; they are going to be gifted with a double vision, for, being Negroes, they are going to be both inside and outside of our culture at the same time. —Richard Wright, The Outsider, 119; emphasis original

Derek Parfit’s engagement with Kantian principles is evident in his approach to the concepts of consent and dignity. In interpreting Immanuel Kant’s claim that it is morally unacceptable “to treat people in any way to which they cannot possibly consent” (OWM 1:179), Parfit posits that Kant “means (E) It is wrong to treat anyone in any way to which this person could not rationally consent.” Parfit terms E “the Consent Principle,” by which “Kant must mean that, when we are choosing how we shall treat other people, we ought always to act with some aim that these people would be able to share.” Correctly interpreted, this principle is unmet “if these people could conceivably share our aim, since many unjustifiable aims could conceivably be shared.” In fine, “we ought to act only with some aim that other people could rationally share, so that they could rationally consent to our way of treating them” (OWM 1:181; emphasis original).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Wainwright, Kantian Dignity and Trolley Problems in the Literature of Richard Wright, American Literature Readings in the 21st Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40216-6_5

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As Parfit avows, Kant’s claim about consent offers “an inspiring ideal of how, as rational beings, we ought all to be related to each other.” Indeed, Parfit strongly believes “it is worth asking whether we could achieve this ideal. We cannot always let everyone choose how we treat them. But we might be able to treat everyone only in ways to which they could rationally consent.” To Parfit, “it is surprising that this principle has been so little discussed,” and his engagement with Kantian principles aims to overcome this neglect: for, “this principle has great appeal, and is worth considering as a separate moral idea, not merely as another way of stating Kant’s Formula of Universal Law” (OWM 1:182).1 Hence, according to the Consent Principle, “when we ask whether someone could rationally consent to some act, our question should be about consent in the act-­affecting sense.” In adhering to this condition, “it is not worth asking whether people could rationally consent to being treated in some way, if their refusal of consent would be a mere declaration, or protest” (OWM 1:183; emphasis original). Furthermore, maintains Parfit, “our question should also be about informed consent. When people do not know what effects some act might have, it is irrelevant whether they could rationally consent to this act” (OWM 1:184; emphasis original). In effectively fulfilling Shelly Kagan’s desire for an ethical approach that focuses on fundamental principles, Parfit additionally posits the need “to accept some wide value-based objective theory” (OWM 1:186; emphasis original), with the grounds for all decisions being evaluative rather than emotional.2 This approach contrasts with Martha C. Nussbaum’s quest to conciliate literary and ethical theories, which pursues the aim of perceptive, rather than reflective, equilibrium. If one assumes “some desire-based subjective theory,” as Parfit warns, “the Consent Principle would not be plausible, and would mistakenly condemn many permissible or morally required acts” (OWM 1:185). The same conclusion holds for narrow value-based objective theories such as Rational Egoism and Rational Impartialism. In the former instance, “we always have most reason to do whatever would be best for ourselves.” In the latter instance, “we always have most reason to do whatever would be impartially best” (OWM 1:381). Either of these positions, however, would also incorrectly censure much permissible or morally required behavior. Under a wide value-based objective theory, explains Katrien Schaubroeck of Parfit’s preferred approach, “practical reasons are provided by facts about the value of what the agent wants, not by the fact that an agent wants it. Reasons are grounded in values such as the value of

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achievement, of pleasure, of friendship and other intrinsic values” (113; emphasis original). To test his claims, Parfit employs trolley problems, such as “Earthquake,” a scenario in which “two people, White and Grey, are trapped in slowly collapsing wreckage.” Parfit is “a rescuer, who could prevent this wreckage from either killing White or destroying Grey’s leg.” The participants “are all strangers to each other; nor do we differ in any other morally relevant way.”3 This scenario clearly demands the saving of White’s life. Of course, “if I saved Grey’s leg, that would be much better for Grey,” as Parfit observes, “and would much better fulfil Grey’s present fully informed desires.” Thus, “according to both desire-based subjective theories, and Rational Egoism, Grey could not then rationally consent to my failing to save her leg, so the Consent Principle would mistakenly imply that it would be wrong for me to save White’s life” (OWM 1:185). “There are countless right acts to which, according to both subjective theories and Rational Egoism, some people could not rationally consent,” remarks Parfit. “If we accept any of these theories, as many people do, we must reject the Consent Principle.” The widespread acceptance of subjective as well as narrow value-based objective theories “may be one reason why this principle has been so little discussed” (OWM 1:185). Certainly, “the Consent Principle does not claim to cover all wrong acts,” but “when this principle fails to condemn some act, it does not thereby allow or permit this act in the sense of implying that this act would not be wrong.” Moreover, the Consent Principle “condemns many such acts, since it would often be irrational to consent to being treated in some way without our actual consent” (OWM 2:144; emphasis original). In pursuing the Consent Principle further, Parfit proposes another trolley problem, one that informs the title of the present chapter. In Lifeboat, “I am stranded on one rock, and five people are stranded on another. Before the rising tide drowns all of us, you could use a lifeboat to save either me or the five” (OWM 1:186). The Utilitarian aspect of this scenario involves the weighing of lives saved and lost in following each course of action. “Whether we could rationally consent to some act depends in part on the benefits or burdens that would come to us or other people in the different outcomes that would be produced by this and the other possible acts. It makes a difference both how great these benefits or burdens would be, and to how many people they would come.” One must also consider “how badly off we and the other people are.” Another possible consideration involves “whether we or the others are responsible for

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various features of our situation.” This issue “might be true, for example, if some of us have worked to produce the possible benefits, or are responsible, through negligence or recklessness, for the possible burdens” (OWM 1:187). “Though I could rationally choose that you save me,” as Parfit argues of Lifeboat, “I could also rationally choose, I believe, that you save the five. I would have sufficient reason to give up my life if I could thereby save five strangers” (OWM 1:187). This selfless choice, which holds even though “we are all young, and would lose as much in dying” (OWM 1:186), produces the optimific result. Parfit calls the attendant rule “the Numbers Principle: When we could save either of two groups of people, who are all strangers to us and are in other ways relevantly similar, we ought to save the group that contains more people” (OWM 1:380). No relevant conflicting reasons would decisively outweigh an agent’s impartial reasons to follow this principle. According to Rational Egoism, however, “I could not rationally choose that everyone accepts the Numbers Principle, since that choice would be worse for me.” Parfit, however, “reject[s] this view” (OWM 1:381). According to Rational Impartialism, “we would be rationally required to sacrifice our life if we could thereby save several strangers.” Accepting this approach, cases like Lifeboat would provide no objection to an agent’s impartial reasons to follow this principle. “I would be rationally required to choose that everyone accepts some optimific principle, such as the Numbers Principle.” After careful consideration, however, Parfit rejects this view too.4 The better alternative is some wide value-based objective view: “When one of two possible acts would make things go in some way that would be impartially better, but the other act would make things go better either for ourselves or for other people to whom we have close ties, we often have sufficient reasons to act in either way” (OWM 1:382). According to a wide value-based objective view, as Parfit maintains, “we are often rationally permitted but not rationally required to give significantly greater weight, or strong priority, both to our own well-being and to the well-being of those to whom we have close ties, such as our close relatives and those we love.” He believes that we ought “to accept some view of this kind” (OWM 1:382; emphasis added). In sum, as philosopher Husain Sarkar notes, “Parfit rightly remarks that it is one thing for you to be asked to give up your own life; it is quite a different story for you to be asked to give up your child’s life” (267). In Lifeboat, then, as Parfit avers, “I could rationally choose that you save me; but I could also rationally

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choose instead that you save the five. So I could rationally choose that everyone accepts the Numbers Principle” (OWM 1:382). In taking issue with Lifeboat, Allen W. Wood discusses Parfit’s scenario with reference to a recent natural disaster; and this connection helps to confirm the relevance of trolley problems to Richard Wright’s “Down by the Riverside.” “There is one intuition about a situation such as Lifeboat that is perfectly clear and not the least suspect,” states Wood: “if any of the six drown, the result is tragic—it is unacceptable” (“HEI” 71). This point was “illustrated dramatically in the universal reaction to the utter incompetence of federal authorities to hurricane Katrina” (“HEI” 72). Wood then turns to Dorothy Allison’s “What It Means to Be Free,” the second of her two Tanner lectures at Stanford University (May 2001), to support his contention.5 “Allison didn’t talk much about moral philosophy as such,” concedes Wood, “but she did discuss a ‘lifeboat problem’” (“HEI” 66). Being introduced to such a thought experiment “was,” recounts Allison, “one of the essential experiences of my education.” As she recalls: It was raised in our freshman orientation class, a seminar in ethical values. “There are twenty of you in a lifeboat,” the lecturer began. Then he gave the list of the twenty—women and children and grown men and almost-­ grown adolescents, a preacher, a doctor, a nursing mother, an elderly woman, an elderly man. The list quickly became complicated and long. The essential fact was that there were too many for the boat to remain afloat. Worse, a storm was coming. If the load were lightened, then some might survive. If it were not lightened, all would die. This was the dilemma that we were given, an exercise we were to work out together. (“WMBF” 321)

“As you do the exercise the task set begins to seem rational,” recounts Allison. “But is it?” she asks. Her feelings toward this exercise informed the title of her first Tanner lecture, “Mean Stories and Stubborn Girls”; and her response to this particularly “mean story” (304), as she attests in “What It Means to Be Free,” was pointedly different to that of her classmates: Around me, the other students started making lists, determining value, choosing who would go over and who survive. I sat there with the blood pounding in my ears and thought about my mama with her cheap makeup and stubborn features, my sisters already mothers themselves and full of shadowy resentment and fear. It was plain to me how the world worked.

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There was no imaginary lifeboat. We were already drowning and had been doing so for generations. I looked up at the professor. He was beaming with enthusiasm and excitement. Surely his enjoyment could not all be intellectual. Surely something else was going on. It had to be a trick question. Maybe we were supposed to refuse to do this. Maybe we were supposed to revolt. (327)

For Allison, “a truly moral ethical decision,” as she asserts, “would be to refuse the parameters of the exercise” (“WMBF” 327). At the time, however, she remained silent. “If I had been strong,” she adds, “I should have stood up and screamed. Throw yourself over, I should have screamed. We will not be thrown over so easily. We will fight you and hate you and haunt your dreams forever. Measure us like stones, and we will fall on your head. Dismiss us like arithmetic, and we will count your days” (“WMBF” 328–29). Wood supports Allison’s response. “Her reaction was to reject the problem—to refuse to answer it at all—on the ground that we should refuse on principle to choose between one life and five lives. Even to pose the question in those terms, she said, is already immoral. The only real moral issue raised by such examples, she thought, is why provision had not been made for more or larger lifeboats” (“HEI” 66; emphasis original). Allison states: I had no responsibility in the brutal equations going on all around me. Freedom is the right and the responsibility to change the rules. Believing yourself a full partner in the society gives you the right to stand up and argue how that society will function. You might suggest we all take turns in the water, that we build bigger lifeboats or put more on board, or that we simply behave as if all of us must be saved or none. We could see how that changes the equations. We are free to make our world reflect our best convictions, not our most base pragmatism. (“WMBF” 329)

More closely adduced, however, Allison’s conclusion is more ambiguous than Wood claims. Her rejection of trolley problems is self-avowedly problematic. “There is no lifeboat, and of course there is,” she observes. “The world is the lifeboat and some of us are already in the water. And yet we are in this thing together. Our world is not so small or embattled that we must become monsters just to keep a few afloat. This is what I should have said. Throw no one over. Leave no one behind. Earn your humanity. Behave as if each of us mattered—until you understand how true that is” (“WMBF” 329). Behaving as if each person mattered is, of course, the

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fundamental bedrock that underpins the dignitarian imperative that Kant proposes and that Parfit supports with the use of trolley problems (Parfit would have had sufficient reason to fulfill Allison’s call for self-sacrifice if he could thereby have saved the others in the lifeboat). Furthermore, as the experience of university lecture Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg in teaching minor literature instances, simply rejecting the problem, simply assuming that everyone is in this terrible situation, brings its own dangers. “Perhaps a particularly thoughtful audience might consider the self-hatred that accompanies internalized racism, classism, homophobia,” writes Goldberg. “Such an audience might be willing to read Franz Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks for an analysis of the psychic damage done to people of color in a racist society (as well as the dehumanizing effect of racism on those who perpetuate it); or read Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina for a fictional indictment of the rampant class bias in this country” (157).6 Unfortunately, however, as Goldberg has seen happen time and again with texts that claim to ask/demand audiences to question their responses to difference—and even with those that don’t overtly ask, but rather embed the questions in their narratives—many members of my student audience simply came away with their opinions about black people, white people, gay people, poor people, and rich people reinforced, tightened, fortified against further questioning and critical analysis. (157)

As Nussbaum herself concludes, “the literary imagination has to contend against the deep prejudices of many human beings and institutions and will not always prevail” (PJ xvii), and what is worse, many of those “who tell wonderful stories are racists who could not tell an individualized empathetic story about a black person” (PJ xvii). Henry James is Nussbaum’s choice for attaining perceptive equilibrium, and while the present argument does not wish to class James as a racist, his ability to tell individualized empathetic stories about minoritarians is doubtful; as a result, James’s novels are unlikely to construct their imagined readers in Nussbaum’s desired form of “ideal moral judge[s]” (129n36). Ironically, however, as “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” attests, Wright might disagree. “Henry James and Nathaniel Hawthorne complained bitterly about the bleakness and flatness of the American scene. But I think that if they were alive, they’d feel at home in modern America,” he avers. “We do have in the Negro the embodiment of a past tragic enough to appease the spiritual hunger of even a James; and we have in the oppression of the

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Negro a shadow athwart our national life dense and heavy enough to satisfy even the gloomy broodings of a Hawthorne” (xxxiv). As Tommie Shelby rightly cautions, many dangers court the use of literary fiction for ethical contemplation, including the naïve belief “that reading fiction will make [the reader] a better person” (515); Wright’s reference in “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” to James concerns past tragedy and perceptive or ethereal appeasement; and even Nussbaum’s self-avowedly, though fleeting, “turn to Wright” (11) in Poetic Justice might fortify prejudices against further questioning, critical analysis, and alternative viewpoints. Beyond these difficulties, what happens when one cannot reject a trolley problem, when one cannot avoid the defining situation? “Wright’s characters,” as Edwin Berry Burgum observes, “fight generally in isolation, or as a little isolated band, with the intensity and at times the morbidity of those who must fight alone.” Their isolation, “if it seems politically a proof that the stamina needed to build an organization precedes organization itself, esthetically it permits a plot that, by stressing conflict of individual wills in place of social forces, gains in dramatic intensity” (“ARWSS” 257). Importantly, “this conflict of wills can exist only when there is a valid conflict between reaction and democracy within society. The writer who can believe in the progressive extension of democracy will be able to recognize the conflict and squarely face it” (“ARWSS” 257–58). The resulting fiction, as Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children illustrates, is tragic in form. In consequence, the influence of Kenneth Burke, whose Permanence and Change Wright purchased in 1935, again comes into play. “We may, like Kant and the theologians, locate ethics in a transcendental source. Or we may, like the Utilitarians, consider ethical weightings as hardly more than an epiphenomenon of buying and selling,” opines Burke. “But whether we discuss the moral as an outgrowth of the economic, or the economic as merely a low order of transcendental moral insight, the same ethical relationship between the individual and his group can be disclosed.” Wright concurred, but he realized that the ethical relationship between the individual and groups other than his own, which is far more difficult to expose, is frequently the most tragic. “Tragedy is a complex kind of trial by jury,” states Burke, “in which the author symbolically charges himself or his characters with transgressions not necessarily considered transgressions in law, and metes out condemnation and penance by tests far deeper than any that could be codified in law” (195). The rational weighing undertaken by many of Wright’s early protagonists, such

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as the teenage Morrison in “Big Boy Leaves Home,” does help, however, to codify and evaluate their tragic situations. According to the classical paradigm, tragedy arises when someone of social standing unknowingly violates an eternal proscription. When that person awakens to this violation, he accepts the allotted punishment, which usually involves physical suffering, with inward resignation. According to the twentieth-century paradigm, however, as Burgum explains, tragedy arises when the proscription “is one created by man, which unfolds, grows richer in content and greater in extension, by the cumulating pressure of man’s exercise of his own potentialities.” Under these circumstances, as the African-American tragedy plays out in Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children, while his protagonists rarely sin, their antagonists often do. “The hero is a common man who is made to suffer,” concludes Burgum of Wright’s art in general, “because he has got in touch with reality, because his awakened potentialities have brought him into conflict with the forces of reaction” (“ARWSS” 258). Unable to reject the problem, having to face the defining situation, the individual must respond; picking an option (even if through inaction) is compulsory. Wright’s acceptance of this obligation evokes Parfit’s wide value-based objective perspective on trolley problems, dilemmas in which both the situational necessity of choosing and the choices on offer are often manifestly tragic. With his turn to Allison, therefore, Wood again unwittingly provides a positive response to trolley problems, invocating classics of minor literature that delineate situations of a Parfitian methodological structure, delineations that are far from cartoonish. The solutions to these dramatized problems do not avoid, discourage, or prevent further questioning, critical analysis, and alternative viewpoints, but encourage intolerance of intolerance. This second-order endorsement helps withal to highlight the dangers of racism, misogyny, and so forth, exploiting Parfit’s partiality contention: “When one of two possible choices would make things go in a way that would be impartially better, but some other choice would make things go better either for ourselves or for those to whom we have close ties, we often have sufficient reasons to make either choice” (OWM 1:186; emphasis added). Intolerance of intolerance precludes unreasonable reasons for picking outcomes. With these considerations of Parfit’s revision of Kantianism in mind, and as the title Lifeboat immediately suggests, this trolley problem is eminently useful to a discussion of “Down by the Riverside” in the contexts of Wright’s early childhood, his parent’s history as sharecroppers, and the

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Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927. Philosophical possibilities concerning how one should live soon surface in this tale from Uncle Tom’s Children, with Wright’s Mann no mere caricature (or Uncle Tom), but a brilliant figuration of moral anguish in the racially conflicted Southern States of the 1920s. Mann does not explicitly and painstakingly formulate his own principles, he does not articulate them and may be unable to do so, but as Kagan insists, “it is not particularly important whether the concepts to which [a philosopher] appeals are familiar ones, or whether they are easy to articulate” (158). For, even if an agent does not recognize such notions or finds them difficult to comprehend, these concepts may support that agent’s thoughts and actions. “People may not be able to articulate [philosophical] proposals,” remarks F. M. Kamm in “How Was the Trolley Turned?” (2016), but such proposals may “underlie their judgments” (61). The appeal of trolley problems to literary hermeneutics takes literary worth beyond what Hanna Meretoja identifies “as moral education or guidance à la Wayne Booth […] or Martha Nussbaum.” This promotion “emphasizes that literature is a mode of ethical inquiry in its own right” (354). In its own small but noteworthy way, then, as the following discussion shows, “Down by the Riverside” provides that which Wood complains trolley problems do not provide, with Wright’s “train of thought” (“How Uncle Tom’s Children Grew” 15), or thoughtful embarkation, hereby providing a mediating agency between accepters and rejecters of trolley problems. Moreover, while Wright’s short story offers an initial case study that is especially apposite, this starting point hopes to stimulate a willingness to widen the interpretive focus to other authors, as Nussbaum urges in “Perceptive Equilibrium.”7 In fact, the Great Mississippi River Flood immediately offers a suggestive possibility for future examination: William Faulkner’s If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem (1939), two interlaced novellas, Old Man concerning physical survival during the great flood, The Wild Palms concerning the pursuit of love. “If we think about the potential field of Katrina studies or, perhaps more importantly for the secondary and post-secondary teachers of the Gulf South, when we consider how to teach the flood,” writes Anthony Dyer Hoefer, “we will need to look beyond the ‘New Releases’ shelves.” Hoefer suggests that instructors “must revisit the artistic and literary representations of the 1927 flood and begin to construct a new provisional canon around works like Richard Wright’s ‘Down by the Riverside’ and the ‘Old Man’ narrative from Faulkner’s If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem.”

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While “neither has earned significant distinction within the oeuvres of these two towering Mississippians” (538), the cultural and political outfall from Hurricane Katrina, as Hoefer rightly avers, “endows both texts with a newfound sense of urgency” (539). If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem represents the majoritarian Faulkner experimenting with literary form, yet writing in a more readerly (or minoritarian) manner than during his earlier engagements with modernisms.8 “While ‘Old Man’ follows a reasonably straightforward narrative line,” concurs Deborah Clarke, “its contrapuntal relationship with ‘Wild Palms’ within the text of If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, dislocates narrative form in true modernist fashion” (151). The formal two-ness or double vision of this experiment encompasses alternating chapters from Old Man and The Wild Palms. “Its double narrative structure,” as Hoefer adduces, “has been considered by many critics to be problematical” (538–39). Intriguingly, however, the doctrine of the double effect and the problem of abortion can unite these two parts in addressing this critical concern. Old Man concerns a prisoner, the so-called tall convict, who is serving a long sentence at Parchman Farm for a botched armed robbery. During the Great Mississippi River Flood, he is conscripted, using a lifeboat to rescue a pregnant woman who is sheltering in a tree from the spate, and doing so despite (not because of) being ordered to do so. Freedom beckons if he dispenses with his charges, either by abandoning them or by letting them drown; a return to prison beckons if he saves their lives. “He wanted so little,” relates the heterodiegetic narrator. “He wanted nothing for himself. He just wanted to get rid of the woman, the belly, and he was trying to do that in the right way, not for himself, but for her. He could have put her back into another tree at any time——” (604). The conscript chooses, however, to save their lives; he finds sufficient reason to fulfill the moral call for self-sacrifice; he discounts what amounts to both a murder and an abortion; and a ten-year extension to his sentence marks his return to the prison farm. “Or you could have jumped out of the boat and let her and it drown,” his fellow inmate, the so-called plump convict, will suggest. “Then they could have given you the ten years for escaping and then hung you for the murder and charged the boat to your folks.” The tall convict, as laconic as ever, agrees: letting his charges drown was an option. “But he had not done that. He wanted to do it the right way, find somebody, anybody he could surrender her to, something solid he could set her down on” (604). From John Rawls’s perspective of reflective equilibrium and from Parfit’s

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wide value-based objective perspective, the tall convict’s decision is ethically charged: he compares different sets of possible lives, discounting his future freedom against the future lives of both the woman and her child. In fact, he has been imprisoned for so long that he has become attuned to incarceration: freedom carries a cost rather than a benefit. The tall convict thinks of Parchman Farm as “home,” and this thought produces feelings: he longs for “the place where he had lived almost since childhood, his friends of years whose ways he knew and who knew his ways, the familiar fields where he did work he had learned to do well and to like, the mules with characters he knew and respected as he knew and respected the characters of certain men” (607). Yet, above this longing, the tall convict considers: his own character (Two years ago they had offered to make a trusty of him. He would no longer need to plow or feed stock, he would only follow those who did with a loaded gun, but he declined. “I reckon I’ll stick to plowing,” he said, absolutely without humor. “I done already tried to use a gun one time too many.”) his good name, his responsibility not only toward those who were responsible toward him but to himself, his own honor in the doing of what was asked of him, his pride in being able to do it, no matter what it was. (607)

The Wild Palms, the other novella in If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, concerns the relationship between Harry Wilbourne, the married Charlotte Rittenmeyer (who is “profoundly tragic” in a manner that invests her “with a dignity” [525]), and the problem of abortion. Charlotte abandons not only her husband but also their daughters (aged two and four) to live with Harry. When she falls pregnant, Charlotte persuades Harry, against his better judgment as an erstwhile medical intern, to perform an abortion. The perceptive Charlotte overrules the reflective Harry. For Charlotte, the emotional cost of children is overwhelming: they extract a price she is unwilling to pay. “They hurt too much,” she tells him. “Too damned much” (642). Despite Harry’s care, the procedure is only partly successful: he aborts the fetus, but Charlotte dies from “toxemia, septicemia” (647; emphasis original). Nemesis seems to have visited a mother for overriding her maternal instincts—and Harry’s fifty-year prison term of hard labor for manslaughter appears to endorse that visitation, on the one hand, and prevalent morality, on the other. From Nussbaum’s perspective of perceptive equilibrium, the tall convict’s ethical decision in saving both the woman and her child would express an awakened desire. Indeed, his dilemma in the lifeboat would

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elicit feelings and perceptions, the sort of perceptive awakening to which Faulkner would later appeal in his “Address upon Receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature” (1950), with the postatomic age supposedly having left a single question, a question of time rather than choice: “When will I be blown up?” For the Nobel laureate, this outer deadening of prospects produces a current inner deadening: “there are no longer problems of the spirit”; as a result, his contemporaries have “forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself” (119). In Old Man, however, the tall convict rarely thinks lasciviously, even when he and his pregnant charge are marooned on either water or land; no, it is the plump convict who decries his fellow inmate’s “ten more years to do without a woman,” a deprecation that the tall convict decries in his turn: the two entwined novellas ending the serpentine twisting that constitutes If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem with the words: “‘Women, shit’ the tall convict said” (726). Interpreted as another mediating agency between accepters and rejecters of trolley problems, Wright’s “Down by the Riverside” reemphasizes the African-American voice, a minoritarian voice at the heart of supposed democracy and purported liberalism, a voice that attempts to push thinking to and beyond the limits of prevalent morality. The Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927 prefigured the economic collapse triggered by the Wall Street Crash. That collapse eventually ushered in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal of 1933; but in composing Uncle Tom’s Children after the formal end of the president’s series of programs in 1937, Wright remained painfully aware of the pressing need for minoritarian expression. “With the signal exception of civil rights,” as John W. Jeffries documents, “the new program set out a framework and agenda for liberal reform that extended beyond Roosevelt’s presidency to the Fair Deal, the New Frontier, and the Great Society” (417–18). That notable exclusion expressed itself through the very necessary social interference promoted by the voices of African-American literature. “Real life is full of white noise,” argues David Edmonds. “Confronted with the charge of artificiality, the best strategy for trolleyology is to embrace it. The thought experiments are deliberately contrived, yet most of them are not so wildly out of the world as to be entirely unrecognizable from actual cases.” For Edmonds, as opposed to Wood, the careful engineering of trolley problems is a recommendation. “The complexity of real life makes it difficult to identify pertinent features of moral reasoning. Trolley cases are designed to extract principles and detect relevant distinctions. They can only do so by blotting out the distracting and distorting sound” (101). In trumpeting minoritarian voices, while baffling

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majoritarian noises, Uncle Tom’s Children and especially “Down by the Riverside” illustrate that artificiality does not characterize the trolley problems of lived experience. Put succinctly, Wright’s signal exception to the racially asymmetrical New Deal produced ethical hiss that that supposed liberalism sought to dampen but failed to mute. “Trolley problems,” complains Wood, “seem to me to abstract not from what is irrelevant, but from what is morally vital about all the situations that most resemble them in real life” (“HEI” 82). He is correct in arguing that an “excellent reason for arranging things so that people have rights and entitlements is simply to make it false that moral issues can ever be reduced to such calculations” (“HEI” 78; emphasis original), but hereafter, Wood leads himself astray. “Some people mistrust rights not based on welfare considerations because they think that such rights are typically appealed to only by privileged minorities (such as wealthy property owners) to justify prevailing social systems (such as those involving manifestly unequal distribution).” These mistrustful people “may think that the assumptions built into trolley problems are right-headed, and my rejection of them is necessarily pernicious. But it would be naïve to think that this is the only meaning such rights could have. In the real world, policies favoring the welfare of a majority (‘the taxpayers’) are often used to rationalize the oppression of underprivileged minorities (‘the underclass’)” (“HEI” 78–79). Considering minoritarians and majoritarians, rather than minorities and majorities, is ethically preferable. Kant recognizes that many injustices are structurally underpinned. These constructs either misalign, misdirect, and misshape the morality of individuals or depreciate, dismantle, and destroy the worth of rectitude. Trolley problems can certainly prove their social worth by exposing such morally unjustifiable structures. “It is not that interpersonal instances of instrumental or telic treatment are not important,” to requote Pablo Gilabert. “It is, rather, that there are structural instances of those kinds of treatment, and the forms of social relations they involve should be given pride of place in social critique and change because of their enormous symbolic and causal significance” (565; emphasis original). Focusing on minoritarians and majoritarians rather than minorities and majorities, as the sociopolitical context on which Wright draws for Uncle Tom’s Children suggests, illuminates a structural instance in which a specific group of individuals, African-American sharecroppers in the postbellum South, cannot abstract themselves from such problems.

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“There are some extreme and desperate situations in human life—such as war or anarchy or natural disaster—in which,” as Wood accepts, “it can look as if the only way to think rationally about them is simply to consider coldly and grimly the numbers of people, the amounts of benefit and harm, and the kind of actions available to you that will produce the benefit and harm” (“HEI” 79). Wood further concedes, “it is significant that we should think of such decisions as being made coldly and grimly, calculating consequences with a kind of economist’s tunnel-vision while totally denying all our normal human thoughts”—as if calculative thoughts are abnormal—“and feelings” (“HEI” 79–80). In extreme and desperate situations, “human beings have been deprived of humanizing social institutions (like those that should provide enough lifeboats, prevent runaway trains and trolleys, keep interlopers off tracks and bystanders away from switches, and so forth) that make it rationally possible not to look at matters” in a normal way. “Trolley problems might help you to think in a rational (if dehumanized) fashion about situations in which that is the only way left to think about them” (“HEI” 80; emphasis original). The authorities had addressed potentially catastrophic inundation at, and upstream of, the Mississippi River Delta almost eighty years before Hurricane Katrina, yet the flood of 1927 became a natural, dehumanizing disaster that tragically complemented a dehumanizing sociopolitical context. Trolley problems do help in interrogating this compounded dehumanization. “Almost immediately, but perhaps too briefly,” reports Hoefer of the aftermath to Hurricane Katrina, “the refrain of Randy Newman’s ‘Louisiana 1927’—‘They’re trying to wash us away’—seemed to take on new, haunting significance.” Newman’s phrase “reminds us that the attempt to understand the consequences of Hurricane Katrina requires us to look into our past” (538). “Contrary to the rhetoric of Presidents George W.  Bush, George H.  W. Bush, and William Clinton,” as James Edward Ford notes, “Hurricane Katrina is not actually an unprecedented discursive event. Like Hurricane Katrina, the 1927 Mississippi Flood generated national debates about the state’s inability to protect its subjects, which called up the twin figures of the refugee and the looter.” Equated by majoritarians with either figure, “black folk inhabit[ed] a position somewhere between citizen and slave” (406), and as conscription akin to subordination in “Down by the Riverside” illustrates, minoritarians were unable to abstract themselves from either identification; as a result, they were doubly dehumanized.

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“What I am calling for,” asserts Nussbaum in her rallying cry to literary scholars, is “an investigation of that which is expressed and ‘claimed’ by the shape of the sentences themselves, by images and cadences and pauses themselves, by the forms of the traditional genres, by narrativity, themselves” (“PE” 263). Literary theorists can provide ethical theorists with these insights. The sources on which each set of theorists draw, however, must be formally, generically, and stylistically broad. Significantly, then, in building on the foundations laid by “Silt,” and effectively offering “Down by the Riverside” as one response to Nussbaum’s appeal for citational breadth, Wright exploits throughout this tale from Uncle Tom’s Children the generic doubling offered by documentary (or nonfictional) fiction. The “urge to take advantage of both the potent appeal of fiction and the documentary solidity of firsthand personal testimony,” as Richard Yarborough observes, “informs much of Wright’s work” (xxv). In nonfictional fiction, as David Lodge elucidates, “the novelistic techniques generate an excitement, intensity and emotive power that orthodox reporting or historiography do not aspire to, while for the reader the guarantee that the story is ‘true’ gives it a compulsion that no fiction can quite equal” (203). The nonfiction novel is Truman Capote’s neologism, and one thinks of his In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences (1966) as a striking example of the genre; but that literary form, as Lodge adduces, “has in fact been around for quite a long time in various guises” (203). J. A. Cuddon identifies the generic archetype as the “documentary novel.” “This form of fiction,” details Cuddon, “was invented by the Goncourt brothers, Edmond and Jules, in the 1860s” under the appellation of the “roman documentaire.” During the twentieth century, “such a novel has become a form of fiction which, like documentary drama, is based on documentary evidence in the shape of newspaper articles, legal reports, archives, and recent official papers” (255). Notable examples from American literature published before In Cold Blood include Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925) and John Hersey’s A Single Pebble (1956). “Complex truths,” remarks Eric Heyne, “may be well served by inventions, exaggerations, slanting, and other transformations of fact.” Critical judgment of nonfiction novels thus requires a double perspective. One angle concerns accuracy, which amounts to “a kind of groundwork, a detailed and sufficiently neutral verbal representation of events, for which the goal is universal agreement or correspondence.” The other angle concerns meaning, which “is much more nebulous, covering virtually

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everything one does with ‘the facts’ once they have been given accurate shape” (486). The meaning derived from a prescient disinterest in detail speaks to factual adequacy rather than factual accuracy. “Whatever philosophy Wright had earlier come across,” write Toru Kiuchi and Yoshinobu Hakutani of his years in Chicago, “he adamantly adhered to his own theory of narrative” (4). However tacit the nature of that adherence, one can read Wright’s “Down by the Riverside” as an instance of documentary fiction that suits not only the groundwork of double African-American dehumanization but also the complex narrative supplied by African-­ American double consciousness. Wright’s generic choice of realism bordering on the documentary, on the one hand, complements the double voice of free indirection in which characters translate the narration, however intermittently and however fleetingly, from hetero- to homodiegesis, and, on the other hand, mitigates the dangers of appealing to fiction for ethical insights. Interestingly, the heterodiegetic narrator in Henry James’s The Ambassadors mentions Lewis Lambert Strether’s double consciousness: “He was burdened, poor Strether—it had better be confessed at the outset—with the oddity of a double consciousness.” This split produces “detachment in his zeal and curiosity in his indifference” (4). Yet, Strether’s burden is as nothing compared with Mann’s double consciousness in Wright’s “Down by the Riverside.” In the African-American experience, “the river” is not merely “within” (1.15), as T.  S. Eliot remarks in “The Dry Salvages” of the human stream of consciousness, but also bifurcated, as by a watershed. W. E. B. Du Bois famously argues that racial intolerance toward African Americans triggers their double consciousness; and Wright’s generic choice of documentary realism brings Du Bois’s influence on him to the fore. “The themes that Du Bois painted in broad brush strokes,” as Dolan Hubbard traces, “may be seen in the works of diverse writers such as C.  L. R.  James (The Black Jacobins), Richard Wright (Native Son and White Man, Listen!), Frantz Fanon (Black Skin/White Masks), […] Audre Lorde (Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches), and Toni Morrison (Song of Solomon and Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination)” (13). Virginia Whatley Smith goes further than Hubbard does, however, identifying a “master/apprentice writer relationship” (87) between the established Du Bois and the newly launched Wright; and the instructive master’s notion of double consciousness certainly informs the willing apprentice’s notion of double vision.

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Initially advanced in “Strivings of the Negro People,” which appeared in the August 1897 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Du Bois amended his concept of double consciousness for The Souls of Black Folk, which A. C. McClurg first published in 1903, with Du Bois’s modified article serving as Chap. 1, under the heading “Of Our Spiritual Strivings.”9 For Du Bois, “the problem of the Twentieth Century,” as he insists in “The Forethought” to his volume, “is the problem of the color-line” (359), a difficulty that Frederic Douglass had previously addressed in “The Color Line” (1 June 1881) for the North American Review.10 “Slavery had the power at one time to make and unmake Presidents, to construe the law, dictate the policy, set the fashion in national manners and customs, interpret the Bible, and control the church; and, naturally enough, the old masters set themselves up as much too high as they set the manhood of the negro too low,” writes Douglass. “Out of the depths of slavery has come this prejudice and this color line. It is broad enough and black enough to explain all the malign influences which assail the newly emancipated millions to-day” (573). Douglass believes that the dissolution of the color line is inevitable. The result will be an all-encompassing respect for consent and dignity. “Let those who wish to see what is to be the future of America, as relates to races and race relations,” he avers, attend, as I have attended, during the administration of President Hayes, the grand diplomatic receptions at the executive mansion, and see there, as I have seen, in its splendid east room the wealth, culture, refinement, and beauty of the nation assembled, and with it the eminent representatives of other nations,—the swarthy Turk with his “fez,” the Englishman shining with gold, the German, the Frenchman, the Spaniard, the Japanese, the Chinaman, the Caucasian, the Mongolian, the Sandwich Islander, and the negro [sic], all moving about freely, each respecting the rights and dignity of the other, and neither receiving nor giving offense. (577)

Notwithstanding Douglass’s confidence, Du Bois lamented the persistence of the color line, and he set about investigating its psychic ramifications for African Americans. For Du Bois, the personal realization of African-American racial identity stems from the initial enforcement of this demarcation, an imposition that can split a unified mind into two separate streams of consciousness. What Du Bois calls the “peculiar sensation” of African-American “double-consciousness” (“SNP” 194; SBF 364) derives

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from the psychological watershed elicited from the traumatic imposition of a supposedly inferior racial identity onto a previously healthy subject. Thus, as Du Bois’s final thesis unambiguously posits, an African American who has newly confronted the concept of race can be numerically identical but qualitatively different to the person that went before—and an intimate aspect of that difference is consciousness. The watershed event productive of African-American double consciousness—an intentional incident from the instigator’s standpoint; an imposition from without for the targeted individual—occurs almost invariably during childhood. “It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the revelation first bursts upon one,” insists Du Bois, “all in a day, as it were” (SBF 363). Significantly, however, in moving from the impersonal to the personal, Du Bois recounts his own experience of this event as a passing psychological shadow (or eclipse) rather than as a permanent division (or schism) of unitary consciousness. “I remember well when the shadow swept across me” (SBF 363). In Great Barrington, Massachusetts, “in a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys’ and girls’ heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards—ten cents a package—and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card,—refused it peremptorily, with a glance” (SBF 363–64). The young Du Bois, expecting the reciprocal gesture he has experienced until now, unguardedly approached the newcomer, but she, as the mention of her height implies, looked down on him with disdain. Whether she had recently arrived from the Unreconstructed South or not, the newcomer renounces the boy according to her notions of racial construction, thereby essentially misrecognizing him as her inferior. Du Bois’s oppressive shadow, however, is not the extreme and common expression of racial dawning. “The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all,” but “with other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny” as with Du Bois, who still “lived above” (364) the watershed, which he calls the “Veil” (359). Thereafter, as a silently and self-­ appointed adult member of the “Talented Tenth” (435)—“who through their knowledge of modern culture,” as he explains in Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (1940), “could guide the American Negro into a higher civilization” (604)—Du Bois could give what most African Americans could not: undivided attention to the existence of double consciousness. Du Bois suggests this personal ability by his skillful avoidance of begging the question. “One,” rather than Du Bois, “ever feels his two-ness” (364; emphasis added). From Du Bois’s singular

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point of view, he appreciates the production of this phenomenon as a manifold event, one that leaves psychological facets of a positive as well as a negative character. Du Bois’s autobiographical account of African-American racial induction finds an ally in the fictional classroom scene from James Weldon Johnson’s (1871–1938) The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912). Indeed, the immediate perception of racial revelation in this novel may be more radical than in the autobiographical case related by his confrère, because Johnson’s protagonist has been unwittingly passing for white. “One day near the end of my second term at school,” he recounts, “the principal came into our room and, after talking to the teacher, for some reason said: ‘I wish all of the white scholars to stand for a moment.’ I rose with the others,” recalls the ex-colored man. “The teacher looked at me and, calling my name, said: ‘You sit down for the present, and rise with the others.’ I did not quite understand her, and questioned: ‘Ma’m?’ She repeated, with a softer tone in her voice: ‘You sit down now, and rise with the others.’ I sat down dazed” (12). The teacher’s intervention completely undercuts the protagonist’s active participation alongside his white classmates. Standing up had automatically, and so it seemed naturally, supported his standing (or dignity), but the command to sit reassigns his place in the social order: he is no longer human and other than other (or white) but now less human and other (or black). From the Freudian perspective on the origin of onanistic perversion, the white children have witnessed the protagonist’s beating, a psychological punishment, which from their perspective, has bruised his skin, leaving him at once black all over and of an entirely different social status. “When school was dismissed, I went out in a kind of stupor. A few of the white boys jeered me, saying: ‘Oh, you’re a n****r too.’ I heard some black children say: ‘We knew he was colored’” (12). Intriguingly, as The Principles of Psychology (1890) reveals, William James’s understanding of altered states of consciousness informs the protagonist’s subsequent psychical development, which witnesses a “pass[age] beyond alterations of memory” to what James calls “abnormal alterations in the present self.” The main types of such alterations are: “(1) Insane delusions; (2) Alternating selves; (3) Mediumships or possessions” (375). While the concept of alternating selves comes closest to Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness, this second category approximates even more closely to what one can term Johnson’s concept of switching consciousnesses. As The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man makes plain, the

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protagonist repeatedly alternates between one stream of thought and the other, but his consciousness rarely evidences the simultaneous inhabitation of both streams.11 The concept of African-American doubleness posited by Wright came in the wake of those proposed by Du Bois and Johnson. “Wright’s understanding of the distinctive standpoint of blacks within the modern world did correspond to Du Bois’s description of a constitutive double consciousness,” observes Paul Gilroy. “Wright referred to it typically as ‘double vision’ rather than double consciousness,” and, “like Du Bois, he was clear that this special condition is neither simply a disability nor a consistent privilege” (161). Ely Houston, the white district attorney in Wright’s The Outsider, describes this double vision in these terms: “I mean this,” Houston hastened to explain. “Negroes, as they enter our culture, are going to inherit the problems we have, but with a difference. They are outsiders and they are going to know that they have these problems. They are going to be self-conscious; they are going to be gifted with a double vision, for, being Negroes, they are going to be both inside and outside of our culture at the same time. Every emotional and cultural convulsion that ever shook the heart and soul of Western man will shake them. Negroes will develop unique and specially defined psychological types. They will become psychological men, like the Jews … They will not only be Americans or Negroes; they will be centers of knowing, so to speak … The political, social, and psychological consequences of this will be enormous.” (119; emphasis original)

Wright draws on autobiographical details for the ostensibly majoritarian figure of Ely. For, as Alan M.  Wald reveals in American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War (2012), Wright borrows the surname Houston “from the Black attorney Charles Houston, who had a personal friendship with Wright going back to the 1930s when Houston was associated with the Scottsboro case,” which involved nine African Americans accused of rape. Charles Houston, former dean of Howard University Law School, defended withal Communist Party USA leader Eugene Dennis (Francis Xavier Waldron) in the 1949 Smith Act case of Dennis v. United States. This was “the first time in American history that an African American lawyer was asked to represent such a well-known political figure” (173). In short, then, as Wright surely intends, minoritarian credentials tacitly underlie the majoritarian attributes of Ely Houston in The Outsider.

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In addition, as Wald’s research for American Night helps to confirm, Ely Houston’s explanation of double vision carries an empathetic rather than a sympathetic tone, because the lawyer is also “directly drawn from Jean-Paul Sartre and especially Fredric Wertham, the Jewish German American psychiatrist, yet another Leftist” (173). While Sartre supplies the philosophical credentials for Ely Houston’s explanation of double vision, Wertham furnishes that character’s sense of being at once inside and outside majoritarian culture. Double vision, which amounts to an adulterated consciousness flowing alongside its original, unadulterated counterpart, is nothing out of the ordinary for American minoritarians; Wright interrogates this simultaneity of consciousness throughout his career; and he “return[s] to its inner ambivalences in both his fiction and his theoretical writings” (Gilroy 161). Although Du Bois’s notion of double consciousness and Wright’s notion of double vision are closely related—more so than either concept is to Johnson’s notion of switching consciousnesses—slight differences do pertain. While the specular aspect of Du Bois’s concept is directly inward looking, but transitively outward looking, Wright’s concept is directly outward looking, but transitively inward looking. Nevertheless, the arguments that follow appeal to the equivalence between these two notions, their correspondence concerning the bifurcation of consciousness provoked by the racialization event and maintained thereafter by racialized attempts at subjugation. In other words, Du Bois’s and Wright’s separate concepts of doubleness are closely enough aligned for the forthcoming discussion to make use of their synonymous characteristics. Nor, one must note, are Du Bois, Wright, and Johnson alone in documenting the doubling or splitting that results from racialization, with James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon, Walter Harris, and Lewis Gordon, among others, tracing similar experiences; and while each author does so with different nuances, “they have all focused on the deformation (double consciousness) that accompanied the racialization of African identities and their subjugation to the ontological needs of white ego genesis” (Paget Henry 156). Wright’s awakening to the notion of race, the nascence of his double vision, echoed Du Bois’s and Johnson’s separate experiences. “My first lesson in how to live as a Negro,” recounts Wright in “The Ethics of Jim Crow,” “came when I was quite small” (1). Ella Wright provided her son with “gems of Jim Crow wisdom” (2). As Shelby explains, this supposed insight “counsels one to never fight or resist whites, to accept that whites have the right to use violence against blacks who refuse to recognize the

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legitimacy of white supremacy, and to be grateful that whites give blacks a chance to make lives for themselves at all” (518). Wright was from the start, however, a New Boy rather than an Uncle Tom, and although his childhood was peripatetic, that wandering remained within the or close to the Mississippi floodplain.12 “We lived in the very heart of the local Black Belt.” Indeed, “everything was so solidly black that for a long time I did not even think of white folks, save in remote and vague terms” (3). Put simply, no provocations—other than his mother’s “gems”—arose for the acquisition of double vision.13 With his perceptive equilibrium unchallenged by racism, Wright freely developed his reflective abilities. Schooling provided a basic training in calculation, analytical thought, logic, and rationality—“I had had two years of algebra” (4)—and as if to emphasize this provision, Wright’s alter ego in The Outsider, Cross Damon, whom Russell Carl Brignano describes as the Communist Party “dialectician,” will spin arguments of what Brignano calls “complex logic” (84). Successfully applying for his first job, which was “with an optical company in Jackson, Mississippi” (3), as he recalls in “The Ethics of Jim Crow,” Wright could boast of this education: the manager “questioned me closely about my schooling, being particularly insistent about how much mathematics I had had,” and “he seemed very pleased when I told him.” Buoyed by acceptance for the position, Wright “had visions of ‘working my way up’” (4). His coworkers soon disillusion him. By turning his visions into double vision, they give him an insight into the minoritarian–majoritarian divide, and this bifurcated view of life soon becomes a prerequisite for survival: “I was very careful to pronounce my sirs distinctly, in order that [the boss] might know that I was polite, that I knew where I was, and that I knew he was a white man” (3–4; emphasis original). Even so, Wright’s coworkers soon succeed in demoting him to subaltern status. “When I was just a bit slow in performing some duty,” he recounts, “I was called a lazy black son-of-a-bitch.” He considers “reporting all this to the boss. But the mere idea of what would happen to me if” his colleagues “should learn that I had ‘snitched’ stopped me” (5). Despite this precaution, Wright soon finds himself facing a logical dilemma, a conundrum imposed by two coworkers. “‘Now, be careful, n****r!’ snarled Morrie, baring his teeth.” This undignified man, whose mien expresses animosity and bestiality rather than civility and humanity, barks: “‘I heard yuh call ’im Pease! ’N’ if yuh say yuh didn’t, yuh’re callin’ me a lie, see?’” (6; emphasis original). The thoughtful Wright immediately

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understands his predicament. “If I had said: No, sir, Mr. Pease, I never called you Pease, I would have been automatically calling Morrie a liar. And if I had said: Yes, sir, Mr. Pease, I called you Pease, I would have been pleading guilty to having uttered the worst insult that a Negro can utter to a southern white man” (6; emphasis original). In effect, Wright’s situation is the counterpart to that facing Buridan’s Ass: two equally unappetizing prospects ensnare the young man. Whereas danger for the ass rests in not choosing, safety for Wright rests in choosing: “I stood hesitating.” Remaining silent, “trying to frame a neutral reply” (6), the young Wright is no irrationally rational beast. His tormentors, however, immediately close their victim’s only logical escape route: “Richard, I asked you a question!” said Pease.14 Anger was creeping into his voice. “I don’t remember calling you Pease, Mr. Pease,” I said cautiously. “And if I did, I sure didn’t mean …” “You black son-of-a-bitch! You called me Pease, then!” he spat, slapping me till I bent sideways over a bench. Morrie was on top of me, demanding: “Didn’t yuh call ’im Pease? If yuh say yuh didn’t, I’ll rip yo’ gut string loose with this bar, yuh black granny dodger! Yuh can’t call a white man a lie ‘n’ git erway with it, you black son-of-a-bitch!” (6–7; emphasis original)

An even nastier difficulty than the original dilemma now confronts Wright. “I knew what they wanted. They wanted me to leave.” In fact, he now faces the problem in its true guise; and, what is worse, he cannot respond to this trolley problem in the manner preferred by Dorothy Allison: he must either suffer physically, but retain psychological health, or suffer psychologically, but retain physical health; he cannot merely reject the dilemma. Wright quickly weighs his options. The former choice offers the prospect of repeated physical abuse until the second choice becomes unavoidable. The latter choice offers an immediate blow to his dignity, but one that ends his present physical torment. “I wilted,” he admits. “I’ll leave,” he tells Morrie and Pease. “I’ll leave right now” (7; emphasis original). Wright’s decision-making and actions during this incident recall those of the unnamed narrator in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864). As previously mentioned, Dostoevsky influenced Wright, and Dostoevsky’s underground man spends hours cogitating over a logical dilemma that casts him as a minoritarian victim, a pigeonholing he wishes to avenge. The causative incident concerned an army officer—a representative of a repressive state apparatus—who supposedly insulted him in a

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tavern.15 “I was standing beside the billiard table, blocking the way unwittingly, and he wanted to pass; he took me by the shoulders and silently— with no warning or explanation—moved me from where I stood to another place, and then passed by as if without noticing. I could even have forgiven a beating, but I simply could not forgive his moving and in the end just not noticing me” (49). In effect, to the protagonist’s way of thinking, the officer had lumped him into the ontological heap of things that have no moral agency. Thanks to such reasoning, the underground man’s self-respect has been thoroughly undermined, and he immediately contemplates redress. “Devil knows what I’d have given then for a real, more regular quarrel, more decent, more, so to speak, literary!” (49; emphasis original). Yet, as the underground man reviews his options, this initiating incident continues to reveal its ethical aspects. This officer was a good six feet tall; and I am a short and skinny fellow. The quarrel, however, was up to me: all I had to do was protest a bit and, of course, I’d be chucked out of the window. But I changed my mind and preferred … to efface myself spitefully. (49)

In this case, self-effacement augurs self-defeat, and this loss is essentially moral. “I turned coward not from cowardice, but from the most boundless vanity,” explains the underground man. “I was afraid, not of six-foot-­ tallness, nor of being badly beaten and chucked out the window; I really would have had physical courage enough; what I lacked was sufficient moral courage” (50). Thereafter, the two men frequently come across each other, but while the underground man always recognizes the officer, the officer never acknowledges the underground man. “I often met this officer in the street and made good note of him. Only I don’t know whether he recognized me. Probably not; I conclude that from certain signs. I, however, I— looked at him with spite and hatred, and so it continued … for several years” (50). During this time, the underground man comes across the officer most frequently on Nevsky Prospect; and dignity, rather than being a common bond, acts as a hierarchical partition: He, too, used mostly to go there on holidays. And he, too, swerved out of the way before generals and persons of dignity, and he, too, slipped among them like an eel, but those of our sort, or even better than our sort, he simply crushed; he went straight at them as if there were an empty space before

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him, and on no occasion gave way to them. I reveled in my spite as I watched him, and … each time spitefully swerved out of his way. It tormented me that even in the street I simply could not be on an equal footing with him. “Why is it invariably you who swerve first?” I kept nagging at myself, in furious hysterics, sometimes waking up, say, between two and three in the morning. (52–53)

As Wright relates in “The Ethics of Jim Crow” of his incident with Morrie and Pease, as a minoritarian (or underground) man, and whatever his protestations otherwise, he must either suffer physically, but retain his psychological health, or suffer psychologically, but retain his physical health. Similarly, while the army officer in Notes from Underground seems to negotiate situations so “simply,” no such simplicity attends the protagonist’s affairs. In each of these literary examples—and however much Dostoevsky’s fixated underground man exaggerates his own situation— the subaltern cannot merely reject the dilemma. “I dreamed of it ceaselessly, terribly, and deliberately went more often to Nevsky, to picture more clearly how I was going to do it when I did it. I was in ecstasy,” reports Dostoevsky’s protagonist. “This intention seemed more and more probable and possible to me. ‘Not really to shove him, of course,’ I thought, growing kinder in advance from joy, ‘but just so, simply not to give way, to bump into him, not so very painfully, but so, shoulder against shoulder, only as much as decency warrants’” (53). The underground man vows, in effect, to restore the psychological balance. Mentally decided, Dostoevsky’s protagonist revisits Nevsky Prospect. Suddenly, within three steps of my enemy, I unexpectedly decided, closed my eyes, and—we bumped solidly shoulder against shoulder! I did not yield an inch and passed by on a perfectly equal footing! He did not even look back and pretended not to notice: but he only pretended, I’m sure of that. To this day I’m sure of it! Of course, I got the worst of if, he was stronger, but that was not the point. The point was that I had achieved my purpose, preserved my dignity, yielded not a step, and placed myself publicly on an equal social footing with him. I returned home perfectly avenged for everything. (55; emphasis added)

Whatever the delusions of Dostoevsky’s underground man, he does attempt to reestablish his supreme value or worth; he does momentarily seem to reinstate dignity as a common bond, by physically announcing his

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presence to the officer in standing shoulder to shoulder with him; and there is something of Dostoevsky’s underground man withal in Ralph Ellison’s unnamed African-American protagonist from the Invisible Man (1952). While the majoritarian gaze often looks straight through this minoritarian agent, thereby denying him his dignity, that agent pinpoints the location of this sociological fault. “That invisibility to which I refer,” he reports, “occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact”; the issue is “a matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality” (3; emphasis original). Perhaps by the early 1940s, during which Wright was composing The Man Who Lived Underground, “he was beginning to mold a new and cynical personal philosophy conceived from his interpretations of works by such men as Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche” (Brignano 148).16 Notwithstanding such later cynicism, and although Wright’s dilemma with Morrie and Pease in “The Ethics of Jim Crow” is of a different, non-­ delusional order to that of Dostoevsky’s underground man—Wright’s tormentors punish anything that amounts to an announcement of agential dignity on his part—Wright tacitly vows to restore the psychological balance. For, unlike the teenage Morrison in “Big Boy Leaves Home,” the teenage Wright remained in the Southern States. Indeed, after a period working in a hotel in Jackson, Mississippi, he “applied for a job” at the Memphis “branch of the optical company” that had previously employed him. His successful application ameliorated the feelings engendered by his forced resignation from the Jackson branch of the business. Wright regained some sense of dignity. In Memphis, where his “Jim Crow education assumed quite a different form,” Wright learns to practice double consciousness for his own good. Racial discrimination “was no longer brutally cruel, but subtly cruel,” he recounts. “Here I learned to lie, to steal, to dissemble. I learned to play that dual role which every Negro must play if he wants to eat and live” (13). Lying, however, has dignitarian consequences, as Henry Sidgwick discusses in The Methods of Ethics in considering whether, as Kant argues with respect to dignity, veracity is deontic. “It does not seem clearly agreed whether Veracity is an absolute and independent duty, or a special application of some higher principle,” adduces Sidgwick. “We find (e.g.) that Kant regards it as a duty owed to oneself to speak the truth” (ME 315). To expand the quotation from Kant that Sidgwick then briefly cites:

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By a lie a human being throws away and, as it were, annihilates his dignity as a human being. A human being who does not himself believe what he tells another (even if the other is a merely ideal person) has even less worth than if he were a mere thing; for a thing, because it is something real and given, has the property of being serviceable so that another can put it to some use. But communication of one’s thoughts to someone through words that yet (intentionally) contain the contrary of what the speaker thinks on the subject is an end that is directly opposed to the natural purposiveness of the speaker’s capacity to communicate his thoughts, and is thus a renunciation by the speaker of his personality, and such a speaker is a mere deceptive appearance of a man, not a man himself.—Truthfulness in one’s declarations is also called honesty and, if the declarations are promises, sincerity; but, more generally, truthfulness is called rectitude. (MM 552–53)

Of dishonesty as the annihilation of dignity, muses Sidgwick, “this seems to be the view in which lying is prohibited by the code of honour.” This appearance is deceptive, however, because the prohibition in question pits the individual against the norms of the collective to which that individual belongs. Thus, “it is not thought (by men of honour as such) that the dignity of man is impaired by any lying: but only that lying for selfish ends, especially under the influence of fear, is mean and base” (ME 315; emphasis original). The tactical demand for mendacity from a victim of racism, victimization in which that individual faces an agent or agents from an antagonistic collective, and in which that individual must lie to safeguard physical health, forms part of the demeaning aspect of such persecution. The need for dishonesty in vital circumstances can impair the liar’s mental health. “There seems to be circumstances under which the code of honour prescribes lying,” remarks Sidgwick. In any such instance, “it may be said to be plainly divergent from the morality of Common Sense” (ME 315), and that obvious divergence impinges on the rationality that underpins Kantian dignity. Lying is de-moralizing. “There is no special grammar of lying, no syntax that discloses the untruth lurking there,” argues Mary Cross in discussing Henry James’s contingencies of style. “With the same words we may tell the truth or deny it; cover up or expose; lie without seeming to and deceive ourselves perhaps most of all. The veracity of a statement is not a question of whether its grammar holds, though the seeming ungrammaticality of a James sentence can keep us on constant alert.” More accurately adduced, that characteristic is a form of hyper-grammar, and James sometimes knowingly demonstrates how language can become overly formalized, mannered,

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and pedantic. In The Wings of the Dove, as Cross remarks, “lying is given credibility by a decorum of language by being in accord with certain social and linguistic—and, in the novel, literary—norms.” Unmasking this disingenuousness requires “a reader attuned to the text’s peculiar rhetoric” (156). Jamesian practice could intentionally acknowledge the dangerous possibilities of linguistic decorum, as The Wings of the Dove attests, yet could intentionally disavow these possibilities too, with The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl testifying to the de-moralization of the author’s own artistic dignity. In comparison, as Helen DeLois Chavis announces in the title of her New Decorum: Moral Perspectives of Black Literature (1971), African-­ American authors challenged, and continue to dispute, linguistic standards and hierarchies. Donald B.  Gibson details Wright’s specific defiance. “Because he was [to some extent] a naturalist,” explains Gibson, “Wright had a range of choices not available to black writers of romance or realism, who were tied to the conventions of these genres—conventions of plot, character, theme, and language—which dictated to a great degree the limits of their fiction. Native Son, in the tradition of naturalism, departs radically from romance and realism. Wright could therefore choose its particular plot with fewer constraints of decorum and propriety; he could feature lower-class characters and focus on their reactions to oppression” (87). This lack of conformity is evident in Wright’s earlier works too. Uncle Tom’s Children, which dispenses with majoritarian proprieties of subject matter, grammar, and language, lays the groundwork for Native Son, and this initial defiance of decorum does not de-moralize the author’s own artistic dignity. Wright’s use of free indirection in Uncle Tom’s Children helps to evidence the natural purposiveness of a character’s capacity to communicate personal thoughts—proof of anything but a renunciation of personality by that character. The innately Kantian literature that is Uncle Tom’s Children gave birth to the innately Kantian and openly Marxist novel that is Native Son. “In Wright’s Native Son,” according to Ralph Ellison in “Recent Negro Fiction” (1941), “we have the first philosophical novel by an American Negro. This work possesses an artistry, penetration of thought, and sheer emotional power that places it into the front rank of American fiction. Indeed, except for its characters and subject matter, it seems hardly identifiable with previous Negro fiction” (22). Not only praising Wright’s inscriptions as providing African-American fiction

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with new inclusions and facets, Ellison also tellingly places the “penetration of thought” of Wright’s artistry before its “emotional power.” As “The Ethics of Jim Crow” attests, Wright’s dual role-playing ability was soon tested, an examination in which italics emphasize his report of consciousness, an examination that he negotiates more successfully than he had his dilemma with Morrie and Pease: One day I stepped into an elevator with my arms full of packages. I was forced to ride with my hat on. Two white men stared at me coldly. Then one of them very kindly lifted my hat and placed it upon my armful of packages. Now the most accepted response for a Negro to make under such circumstances is to look at the white man out of the corner of his eye and grin. To have said: “Thank you!” would have made the white man think that you thought you were receiving from him a personal service. For such an act I have seen Negroes take a blow in the mouth. (15; emphasis original)

In effect, this scenario confronts Wright with another trolley problem, but unlike the structurally similar dilemma in Jackson, he avoids both a major blow to his dignity and any physical violence. “Finding the first alternative distasteful, and the second dangerous, I hit upon an acceptable course of action which fell safely between these two poles. I immediately— no sooner than my hat was lifted—pretended that my packages were about to spill, and appeared deeply distressed with keeping them in my arms.” He could not refuse what Allison calls the parameters of the exercise, but he could and did sidestep them. “In this fashion I evaded having to acknowledge his service, and, in spite of adverse circumstances, salvaged a slender shred of personal pride” (15; emphasis added). “Self-respect is about living with personal dignity” (529), writes Shelby. “We not only take pleasure in our own respect and admiration,” adds Sidgwick, “but still more, generally speaking, in the respect and admiration of others.” This desire “is held to be to some extent legitimate, and even a valuable aid to morality: but as it is a dangerously seductive impulse, and frequently acts in opposition to duty, it is felt to stand in special need of self-control” (ME 336). This impulse informs the relays of racism. The racist agent demands respect and admiration from victims who understand that demand as nonreciprocal. Personal dignity, as Shelby notes, is “sometimes called pride” (529). To recall Philippa Foot’s observation, “the subject of the virtues and vices was strangely neglected by moralists working within the school of analytic

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philosophy” (“VV” 1), an indifference that was more than two hundred years in the making. Consequently, at least in part, the concept of pride is morally ambiguous. “Pride can sometimes be a vice, as when it takes the form of arrogant self-satisfaction,” remarks Shelby. “But it can sometimes be a virtue, when for example it expresses an appropriate sense of one’s value” (529n25; emphasis original). As Shelby asserts, in drawing on the separate findings of Bernard R. Boxill and Thomas Hill, Jr., “the person who lacks self-respect fails to have the right attitude about his or her moral status” (528). In contrast, Wright’s shred of “personal pride” in the lift scenario from “The Ethics of Jim Crow” expresses a reasonable self-esteem. In general, as Boxill argues, “there is no question that black pride is a necessary and desirable feeling. A person who lacks due pride in his race will probably lack self-esteem, self-respect, and autonomy, and racism has, of course, done all it can to undermine that pride in black people” (176). Hill agrees with this reasoning but adds a caveat: “If a person continues in his deferential role just from laziness, timidity, or a desire for some minor advantage, he shows too little concern for his moral status as a person.” What is worse, “a black who plays the Uncle Tom merely to gain an advantage over other blacks” is not only “harming them, of course,” but “also displaying disregard for his own moral position as an equal among human beings” (11). “To lack self-respect,” avers Shelby, “is to fail to properly value one’s moral rights.” In philosophical terms, “this broadly Kantian picture of self-respect” emphasizes “the need to show a respect for morality” (528). The oppressed must try to preserve their sense of worth, but “maintaining one’s self-respect in the face of injustice,” as Shelby explains, “is not simply about respecting the authority of morality.” Focusing exclusively on this moral aspect makes the individual incidental to that expression. “The sense of self-regard, of a personal stake in such respect, is inexplicable in such terms. A life without a healthy sense of self-respect is an impoverished life for the particular person whose life it is” (528–29). The trolley problem inside the Memphis lift from “The Ethics of Jim Crow” at once offers a taste of Wright’s personal determination to retain a healthy sense of self-respect and anticipates the sort of dilemmas that will face various African Americans in “Down by the Riverside.”

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Notes 1. Parfit explains the Formula of Universal Law as follows: “We act wrongly, claims Kant, if we act on some maxim that we could not rationally will to be a universal law” (OWM 1:14). The three versions of this formula are the Law of Nature Formula, the Permissibility Formula, and the Moral Belief Formula. Under the Law of Nature Formula, “it is wrong to act on some maxim unless we could rationally will it to be true that everyone accepts this maxim, and acts upon it when they can.” Under the Permissibility Formula, “it is wrong to act on some maxim unless we could rationally will it to be true that everyone is morally permitted to act upon it.” Under the Moral Belief Formula, “it is wrong to act on some maxim unless we could rationally will it to be true that everyone believes that such acts are morally permitted” (OWM 1:15). 2. This definition suggests that Parfit’s stance and Ubuntu/Botho (see Chap. 3, note 3) coincide on this matter. 3. In pursuing a theory of perceptive equilibrium that attunes literary theory and ethical theory, Nussbaum acknowledges the need “to look at philosophical authors as makers of stylistic choices, asking what ethical commitments their own literary choices express” (“PE” 257). Parfit at once generally uses pared down language and tends to avoid the binary construct of black and white. 4. “As Sidgwick saw, but did not clearly enough state,” observes Parfit, “Rational Egoism is best regarded, not as a moral view, but as an external rival to all moral views. We can make a similar claim about Strong Rational Impartialism” (OWM 3:345). 5. “What It Means to Be Free” is cited parenthetically hereafter as “WMBF.” 6. Fanon initially published Black Skin, White Masks (1967) in French as Peau noire, masques blancs (1952). 7. The overarching aim of this part of Kantian Dignity and Trolley Problems in the Literature of Richard Wright is to promote the consideration of not only trolley problems in literary settings but also how these settings support the philosophical usefulness of such scenarios. 8. If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem instances the argument that the canon of minor American letters includes majoritarian authors operating with a minoritarian sensibility (see Chap. 2, note 7). 9. “Strivings of the Negro People” is cited parenthetically hereafter as “SNP.” 10. The Souls of Black Folk is cited parenthetically hereafter as SBF. 11. Notwithstanding such degrees of closeness, William James’s concept of alternating selves remains somewhat isolated from the racial initiations of African Americans and the psychological aftermaths of those initiations. “The phenomenon of alternating personality in its simplest phases seems based on lapses of memory,” suggests James. “Any man becomes, as we

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say, inconsistent with himself if he forgets his engagements, pledges, knowledges, and habits; and it is merely a question of degree at what point we shall say that his personality is changed” (379). In a later, more complex phase of this phenomenon, “in which the secondary character is superior to the first, there seems reason to think that the first one is the morbid one. The word inhibition describes its dulness [sic] and melancholy” (384). 12. The family moved from Natchez, Mississippi, to Elaine, Arkansas, to Jackson, Mississippi. 13. The fate of Wright’s Uncle Hoskins in Arkansas (see Chap. 7, note 3) was the one notable exception to this relative tranquility. 14. Of course, in subsequently reporting this incident in “The Ethics of Jim Crow,” Wright pays his interlocutor the disrespect he deserves, leaving out “Mr.” in writing “said Pease.” 15. The Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser posits the existence of ideological and repressive state apparatuses. The social classes Karl Marx identified in nineteenth-century Europe evolved from the economic base of capitalism: the lumpenproletariat (farmers and social outcasts with little revolutionary potential), the proletariat (hands and workers with revolutionary potential), the capitalists (oppressive industrialists who own the means of production), and the bourgeoisie (oppressive middle classes who control commerce). The superstructure of the state that also emerged from this economic base exercises control through repressive state apparatuses (RSAs) and ideological state apparatuses (ISAs). RSAs are state-sanctioned institutions of physical repression, such as the army, police, courts, and prisons. When necessary, these apparatuses intervene to protect and maintain the present economic base and its attendant superstructure. ISAs are state-sanctioned institutions of mental repression, such as religion, education, communication (press, radio, and television), and culture (arts and sports). In general, as civilizations evolve, while the importance of RSAs recedes, the importance of ISAs advances. For Marxists, ideology is the distortion between the individual, as a conscious being, and the state, as a functioning entity. This misrepresentation helps to subjugate the individual by making economic, social, and political structures appear immutable. RSAs and ISAs are necessary for the ruling classes (or majoritarians) to maintain their social status. Marxist analysis, while making majoritarians aware of the necessity of ISAs to their position of command, also enables subjugated classes (or minoritarians) to measure, and so attempt to close, or even to erase, interclass discrepancies. 16. Ironically, The Man Who Lived Underground did not announce its full presence to public scrutiny until after Wright’s death: its drastically abridged version appearing as one of the stories in Eight Men (1961), the entire book not being published until 2021.

CHAPTER 6

Richard Wright’s Travails of Mann

Something hard began to press against the back of his head and he saw it all in a flash. —Richard Wright, “Down by the Riverside,” 110

In Richard Wright’s “Down by the Riverside,” as certified by its documentary credentials, the Mississippi River is in violent spate. As his surname and withheld forename imply, Mann, the protagonist of this story, is the generic man of a minoritarian people, or African-American agent of double consciousness, who must deal with this natural and social disaster. Mann’s direct view of affairs constantly battles with his awareness of how majoritarians perceive him, a form of double effect that appeals to the difference between direct intention—what that agent foresees will result from that agent’s first, unmediated, originary consciousness—and indirect (or oblique) intention—what that agent foresees will result from that agent’s second, mediated, supplementary consciousness. Voluntary action (doing) vies with its involuntary counterpart (coerced allowing), with Mann’s plight during the flood of 1927 supplying a bifurcated, African-­ American view of human interrelations in the Southern States of the 1920s. The racist imperative informs the supplementary, involuntary, coerced side of Mann’s double vision. “Wright viewed the attempt by whites to

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Wainwright, Kantian Dignity and Trolley Problems in the Literature of Richard Wright, American Literature Readings in the 21st Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40216-6_6

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break the spirits of Southern blacks, to make them complicitous in their own oppression, as perhaps the key racist imperative” (xiii), states Richard Yarborough. Tommie Shelby agrees: the most insidious aspect of racism “is that it structured the consciousness of the oppressed, leading individual blacks to police themselves and each other,” instituting an ethos that made “them unwitting contributors to their own degradation” (519). Yet, underpinning Mann’s bifurcated viewpoint is (in effect) a Kantian sense of dignity, which is at once akin to and alien to Mrs. Newsome’s sense of dignity in Henry James’s The Ambassadors, with “Down by the Riverside” portraying this compounded experience, articulating the dissonance between self-respect, distrust, and fear. Mann’s house resounds to the physical and mental state of its owner. “He walked to the window and the half-rotten planks sagged under his feet. He had never realized they were that shaky.” The situation is critical, and the heterodiegetic narrator’s description of the floodwater is portentous: “at night it was black, like a restless tide of liquid tar,” an image that recalls Bobo’s lynching from the previous tale in Uncle Tom’s Children, “Big Boy Leaves Home.” Indeed, Mann’s thoughts about the inundation have been so intense, so restless, as to have produced a physiological sensation: “He pulled back a tattered curtain, wishing the dull ache would leave his head” (62). The previous morning, “he had seen his only cow, Sally, lowing, wagging her head, rolling her eyes, and pushing through three feet of water for the hills” (62–63); sharecropper folklore counsels “that a man who would not follow a cow was a fool”; the over thoughtful Mann had “figured” otherwise, however, ostensibly because “this was his home” (63). “But now he would have to leave, for the water was rising and there was no telling when or where it would stop” (63). In fact, for the Manns, two sets of waters broke four days ago. There was not only the Mississippi River (“Droning water. For four long days and nights it had been there, flowing past” [64]), but “worst of all there was Lulu flat on her back these four days, sick with a child she could not deliver” (63). Inaction will relieve neither state of affairs; each situation demands a robust response; and Lulu, in her prolonged and agonizing struggle, anticipates the travails her husband must face. On one level, the Christian name Lulu is appropriate to her African-American descent, sounding a lu lu, or double effect. On another level, the plight of the doubly plangent Lulu—“her hips is jus too little” (65), according to her husband, and “she too little t have [the baby] widout a doctah” (70)—evokes the thoughts of Philippa Foot, who

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unwittingly birthed the trolley problem from her embarkation point of abortion and the doctrine of the double effect. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), as Sigmund Freud concedes, “there is at least one spot in every dream at which it is unplumbable—a navel, as it were, that is its point of contact with the unknown” (111n1); and Wright’s “Down by the Riverside” effectively foretells of the unexpected contacts generated from Foot’s philosophical parturition, with Lulu’s travails ushering in her husband’s trolley problems. These difficulties await a man who is currently trapped in his thoughts as well as by his physical situation. “He had had a chance to get away and he had acted like a fool and had not taken it. He had figured that the water would soon go down. He had thought if he stayed he would be the first to get back to the fields and start spring plowing.” Put bluntly, while Lulu’s unrelieved condition precipitates Mann’s trolley problems, the capitalist imperative remains their basic determinant: a few days earlier, Mann had refused his family’s evacuation on a Red Cross boat, banking on the waters receding and “be[ing] the first to get back to the fields” (63; emphasis added). The hope of stealing a march on his neighbors—whom the system and natural disaster have conspired to cast as competitors rather than confrères—had implicitly rooted Mann to his home. “Put in an almost impossible situation of poverty and immobility,” notes William Howard of Wright’s protagonist, “he has no choice if he wants to succeed but to take chances” (60). Capitalism has violated Mann’s dignitarian norms, offering him little scope for initiative, other than to gain an advantage over his fellow sharecroppers. As soon as his friend Bob alerts him to the danger of being conscripted for levee duty, however, Mann reverses his economically drastic decision: he gives one of the family’s remaining means of subsistence, their only mule, to Bob to exchange or sell for a boat. Such a deal would provide the means for Lulu’s ferrying to the Red Cross Hospital. “They would have to take her in,” reasons Mann, as if invoking the doctrinal dynamics of the double effect: “They would not let a woman die just because she was black; they would not let a baby kill a woman” (66; emphasis original). “Ol man Bowan bought the mule,” Bob later tells Mann, but “Ah couldn’t buy a boat nowheres” for fifteen dollars, “so Ah ups n steals” one “when nobody wuz lookin” (67). Bob offers this boat to Mann; Mann “sho wished yuh hadn’t stole it”; and “Mann,” as with the thoughtful Richard Wright facing the dilemma posed by the bestially undignified Morrie in “The Ethics of Jim Crow,” “hesitate[s]” (68). Like the

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contemplative Wright, Mann tries to frame a neutral response, imagining that the boat owner, the white postmaster Henry Heartfield, will appreciate that his property has been commandeered (rather than misappropriated or stolen). The portentousness of the Manns’ situation, however, suggests otherwise, as do racial politics. Being cheated on the price of Mann’s mule by Bowan, “tha ol stingy white ape” (67), expresses that politics in the first instance. Taking the property of a racist government official, who “hates n****rs” (69), expresses that politics in the second instance. Knowing a racist functionary called Heartfield, whose surname ironically posits the postmaster’s heartlessness, expresses that politics in the third instance. Mann’s mindful hesitation over the boat concerns the choice between negative duties (Bob’s appropriation of Heartfield’s property) and positive duties (Mann’s rescue of his own family); and Judith Jarvis Thomson, while discussing Foot’s deontological findings, “think[s] we may be helped if we turn from evils to goods” (“KLD” 209). Thomson’s first example toward achieving this aim, a scenario she names Health-Pebble, bears comparison to Mann’s current dilemma in “Down by the Riverside.” “Suppose there are six men who are dying,” propounds Thomson: Five are standing in one clump on the beach, one is standing further along. Floating in on the tide is a marvelous pebble, the Health-Pebble, I’ll call it: it cures what ails you. The one needs for cure the whole Health-Pebble; each of the five needs only a fifth of it. Now in fact that Health-Pebble is drifting towards the one, so that if nothing is done to alter its course, the one will get it. We happen to be swimming nearby, and are in a position to deflect it towards the five. Is it permissible for us to do this? (“KLD” 209)

From Thomson’s perspective, “it is permissible for us to deflect the Health-Pebble if and only if the one has no more claim on it than any of the five does” (“KLD” 209). In “Down by the Riverside,” while the Manns constitute five people (Mann, Lulu, their unborn child, their son Peewee, and Grannie), the Heartfields constitute four people (father, mother, son, and daughter). Whereas the weightings in Thomson’s philosophical Health-Pebble and Wright’s fictional lifeboat are marginally different, the two scenarios are structurally analogous. “What could make it be the case that the one has more claim on [the Health-Pebble] than any of the five does?” (209), asks Thomson. Similarly, what could make it be the case that the Heartfield quartet has more claim

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on the lifeboat than the Mann quintet does? Utilitarianism implies that the five Manns have the greater claim: a numerical comparison between the families is, because of Lulu’s pregnancy, in the Manns’ favor (there is no textual evidence to suggest that Heartfield’s wife is pregnant). Under such circumstances, to appropriate Thomson, and substituting the lifeboat in Wright’s scenario for the pebble in Thomson’s thought experiment, “it is permissible for us to deflect it in order to bring about that it saves more lives than it would do if we did not act” (“KLD” 210). Simply put, in each situation, “a good” is “up for distribution” (“KLD” 215), and utility demands its widest effective allocation. Yet, as Thomson points out, definite or promised ownership might alter the moral calculation. “The Health-Pebble might actually belong to the one. (It fell off his boat.) Or it might belong to us, and we had promised it to the one.” In either of these cases, as Thomson avers, “the one has a claim on it in the sense of a right to it.” If the one alone owns the Health-­ Pebble, “or if we have promised it only to the one, then he plainly has more claim on it than any of the five do; and we may not deflect it away from him” (“KLD” 209). In “Down by the Riverside,” Heartfield owns the lifeboat appropriated by Bob and that ownership might prove morally decisive. That Bob took the lifeboat without Mann’s knowledge or consent also adds to the equation, however, and might mitigate the postmaster’s claim. In a sense, the lifeboat, as if adrift on the flood, has simply ended up with the Manns. Faced with a trolley problem over the lifeboat, Bob acted as if the Manns had more right to it than the Heartfields did. Bob had already been cheated on the sale of the Manns’ mule, one of the family’s remaining means of subsistence; as a corollary, Bob had refused to be cheated out of his friends’ existence. If the Heartfields were going to prosecute their own escape from the flood, they ought to have used their lifeboat by now, and Bob’s actions appear to be a valid response to their inertia. “There is no Principle of Moral Inertia,” explains Thomson: “there is no prima facie duty to refrain from interfering with existing states of affairs just because they are existing states of affairs” (“KLD” 209). Inertia defines the postmaster and his family, but it need not define Bob too. Moreover, even though the Heartfields might have eventually chosen to act, this prospect does not suppose that one may never redistribute someone else’s property. There may be situations, as Thomson maintains, “in which we may even take from one something that he needs for life itself in order to give to five” (“KLD” 213). As “Down by the Riverside”

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makes plain, Bob transfers user rights in a scenario that is open to abuse, and while the situation is unfortunate for that reason, that transference is not necessarily unjust. Even so, as his reaction when Elder Murray arrives to comfort Lulu evinces, Mann does worry over the matter of justification; and this mental quandary, which the racially inculcated side of his consciousness impels, helps to confirm Mann’s tendency toward complicity in his own oppression. Murray has arrived in his own boat. Mann thinks of passing on the appropriated lifeboat, and the dangers of being branded its thief, to the Elder, with the literary device of free indirection helping to underwrite Mann’s thoughts about redirecting the lifeboat. “Mabbe the Elderll take mah boat n lemme have his since hes on his way t the hills? Lawd, yeah! Thall be a good way t dodge them white folks! Ahm ast im.” By the time Murray has finished praying for Lulu, however, Mann’s immoral resolve has foundered. “Naw, he thought, ain no use astin the Elder t take mah boat. Hell wanna know why n then Ahll have to tell im Bob stole it” (72). This prospective admission only heightens Mann’s misgivings. Bob has flouted what is, under normal circumstances, a minor, trivial, non-­stringent property right; the flood has dramatically increased the degree of that contravention; and the racial politics of the South have compounded that degree. No wonder Mann’s resolve founders: morality governs him; he will endanger neither Bob nor Murray. A matter of degree characterizes Mann’s unresolved case, and in “The Trolley Problem” (1985), Thomson further examines this circumstantial aspect to such dilemmas. While this examination involves at once a scenario she names Bystander at the Switch and some of its variants, all these situations are “in some ways like Mrs. Foot’s story of the trolley driver” (1397).1 In Bystander at the Switch, “you have been strolling by the trolley track, and you can see the situation at a glance: The driver saw the five on the track ahead, he stamped on the brakes, the brakes failed, so he fainted. What to do? Well, here is the switch, which you can throw, thereby turning the trolley yourself. Of course you will kill one if you do” (“TP” 1397). In the Loop Variant, “the tracks do not continue to diverge—they circle back” (“TP” 1402), forming a single loop, as Fig. 6.1 illustrates. In addition to the circumstance of the loop in the scenario diagrammed above, adds Thomson, “the five on the straight track are thin, but thick enough so that although all five will be killed if the trolley goes straight, the bodies of the five will stop it, and it will therefore not reach the one. On the other hand, the one on the right-hand track is fat, so fat that his

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Fig. 6.1  The loop variant to Bystander at the switch

body will by itself stop the trolley, and the trolley will therefore not reach the five” (“TP” 1403). May the agent turn the trolley in this case? Adding the Fat Man scenario from “Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem” to the contemplative mix, Thomson responds: For my own part, I do not find it obvious that [the agent] may. (Remember what the bystander will be doing to the one by throwing that switch.) But others tell me they think it clear the bystander may proceed in such a case. If they are right—and I guess we should agree that they are—then that must surely be because the rights which the bystander would have to infringe here are minor, trivial, non-stringent—property rights of no great importance. By contrast, the right to not be toppled off a footbridge onto a trolley track is on any view a stringent right. We shall therefore have to recognize that what is at work in these cases is a matter of degree: If the agent must infringe a stringent right of the one’s in order to get something that threatens five to threaten the one (as in Fat Man), then he may not proceed, whereas if the agent need infringe no right of the one’s (as in Bystander at the Switch), or only a more or less trivial right of the one’s (as in [the loop variant to] Bystander at the Switch), in order to get something that threatens five to threaten the one, then he may proceed. (“TP” 1411; emphasis added)

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Faced with a comparable trolley problem in “Down by the Riverside,” faced with saving either the five Manns or leaving the four inactive Heartfields to save themselves, Bob infringed a stringent right but not at Mann’s behest. In fine, whereas the degree of stringency flouted is severe, Mann has very little chance of returning the lifeboat to the Heartfields, the utility scores between the families are in the Manns’ favor, and there is no Principle of Moral Inertia.2 Furthermore, the severity of the infringement redounds in large part on the postmaster, whose racial prejudice cannot help but impel such a transgression. Hence, with the moral balance in his favor, and quite logically, Mann decides to use, or redistribute, the Heartfields’ lifeboat. “There ain nothin else t do,” he concludes. “Ahll try t take tha boat back t the white folks aftah Ah git Lulu t the hospital” (69). Indeed, Mann repeatedly imagines doing so: “Ahma take tha boat back t the white folks aftah Ah git Lulu t the hospital” (72); “He oughta be glad ef Ah brings im his boat back” (72). The Manns, therefore, embark; but, as a result, Mann must gamble. In an ideal world, to quote a Pascalian byplay between Inspector Vigot and Thomas Fowler from Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1955), an agent never wagers. “Let us weigh the gain and losses,” quotes the inspector, “in wagering that God is, let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose you lose nothing.” Fowler “quote[s] Pascal back to him—it was the only passage I remembered. ‘Both he who chooses heads and he who chooses tails are equally at fault. They are both in the wrong.’” Dorothy Allison would concur. “True course,” concludes Fowler in closing his quotation from Pascal, “is not to wager at all.” True, retorts Vigot, “but you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked” (130). Soon after the family’s embarkation in “Down by the Riverside,” Mann “felt wild panic” (75), but eventually clasping what turns out to be a newel post outside a submerged local store, his reflective self manages to overcome its perceptive counterpart. “He could feel the tugging and trembling of the current vibrating through his body as his heart gave soft, steady throbs. He breathed hard, trying to build in his mind something familiar around the cold, wet, smooth pieces of wood. A series of pictures flashed through his mind, but none fitted. He groped higher, thinking with his fingers.” Mann’s groping is as much mental as physical, and his thoughts finally elicit a revelation: “suddenly he saw the whole street: sunshine, wagons and buggies tied to a water trough” (76). Double consciousness, however, immediately intervenes: actually seeing lights, believing “he could get some help there” (77), triggers an

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episode of double vision in Mann that flickers between brightness and dimness, between free indirection and heterodiegesis, between perspicacity and obtuseness. “Where there were lights there were people, and where there were people there was help. Wondah whose house is tha? Is they white folks? Fear dimmed the lights for a moment; but he rowed on and they glowed again” (77–78). Tragically, the property in question is the post office, which the Heartfields still occupy, and the Manns’ arrival alerts the owner of the lifeboat to its present occupants. “If the one has no more claim on the good than any of the five has,” argues Thomson in Health-­ Pebble, “he cannot complain if we do something to it in order to bring about that it is better distributed; but he can complain,” she adds, “if we do something to him in order to bring about that it is better distributed” (“KLD” 215; emphasis original). “Our moral lives are ‘stories’ in which,” to repeat Martha C. Nussbaum’s premise from “Flawed Crystals,” “risk play[s] a central and a valuable role” (142). In the allocation of the Heartfields’ lifeboat in “Down by the Riverside,” the postmaster tries to ensure that his property is “better” distributed by doing something to Mann: he fires “two pistol shots” (79) at the rower, who “even chances shooting Heartfield,” as Howard remarks, “to save Lulu’s and his family’s lives” (60; emphasis added). For Anthony Dyer Hoefer, “the confrontation between Mann and Heartsfield [sic] is impelled toward violent conclusion by the extant racial structures, by the implicit racial fears that are normally kept in check by rigidly prescribed, ritualized enactments of paternal authority and deference.” In shattering the levees, the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927 shattered normality: “Those rituals simply do not work in the context of a natural disaster; they neither facilitate cooperation nor allow African Americans the opportunity to protect themselves” (549). In other words, the trolley problem that the reflective Mann faces demands the abandonment of customary behavior, and the dissolution of paternal authority is, in fact, already coded into the problem he shares with Henry Heartfield. Even if the ownership of the lifeboat were not a factor, even if the Heartfields have no more claim against death than the Manns do, the postmaster could complain if an external agent did something to him to bring about the better distribution of death among the participants. While Fyodor Dostoevsky’s protagonist from Notes from Underground eventually summons the courage to barge into the army officer whom he supposes of constantly slighting him, with the trivial nature of his revenge not prohibiting such a reaction, in Fat Man, “it is not permissible for George

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to shove his fat man off the bridge into the path of the trolley,” thereby causing his death (“KLD” 215; emphasis original). Notwithstanding such a proscription, suggests “Down by the Riverside,” immoral acts often redound on immoral actors. The postmaster’s heartlessness, his perceptive equilibrium concerning African Americans, his racial perception, or field of racial vision blindsides reasonable reflection on his part. That Mann must risk shooting the postmaster reflects Henry Heartfield’s unreasonableness, his disturbing phantasy of intolerance, and his emotional resort to violence. In effect, the postmaster does something that is fatal to himself (and possibly to his family), with the shootout over the appropriated lifeboat ending in Henry Heartfield’s (rather than Mann’s) death. The postmaster forced Mann to accept a distributive exemption, the type of exception that Thomson outlines concerning Bystander at the Switch. “The bystander who proceeds does not make something be a threat to people which would otherwise not be a threat to anyone,” she expounds: He makes be a threat to fewer what is already a threat to more. We might speak here of a ‘distributive exemption,’ which permits arranging that something that will do harm anyway shall be better distributed than it otherwise would be—shall (in Bystander at the Switch) do harm to fewer rather than more. Not just any distributive intervention is permissible: It is not in general morally open to us to make one die to save five. But other things being equal, it is not morally required of us that we let a burden descend out of the blue onto five when we can make it instead descend onto one. (“TP” 1408)

Immediately after the fatal shot, Mann “threw his weight desperately, shoved out from the wall and paddled against the current” (80). Having left the post office, the dead postmaster, and Henry’s remaining family behind, the Manns eventually land at a command post. “Well, Ill be Goddamned!” exclaims one of the soldiers. “N****r, you take the prize! I always heard that a n****rd do anything, but I never thought anybody was fool enough to row a boat against that current” (84). Mann, however, had to wager; he had no alternative; having regained his bearings at the post office, and despite the violence ensuing from Heartfield’s intervention, rowing against the current was Lulu’s only hope. Indeed, the Manns are now ferried from the command post to the Red Cross Hospital; but this is a Pyrrhic victory: Lulu is dead and so is the baby. “Well, boy, it’s all

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over,” the doctor tells Mann. “Maybe if you could have gotten her here a little sooner we could have saved her. The baby, anyway. But its all over now, and the best thing for you to do is to get your folks to the hills” (88). Tragically, then, the deaths of Lulu and the baby save Mann from a confrontation with the medical staff, which would have amounted to an altercation over the problem of abortion and the doctrine of the double effect. Lulu’s prolonged and agonizing travails, which occurred mainly outside the narrative, premonitorily and silently spoke volumes on the manifestation of the double negative of denied human agency. “The abortion with which she travaileth,” to quote Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “To—— (‘Corpses are cold in the tomb’)” (1819), “Is Liberty, smitten to death” (9–10; emphasis original). Hereafter, in “Down by the Riverside,” and “though Wright is [often] fairly criticized for his stereotypical and sexist depictions of black women” (Shelby 525n18), the metaphysical Lulu becomes a source of inspiration for the thoughtful (or ratiocinative) widower. Now that the authorities circumscribe Mann’s freedom of movement—he cannot use Heartfield’s craft to get his surviving family members to the hills, because the army, as Mann had effectively done, has “commandeered” (90) the lifeboat—he must above all think rationally.3 Finding himself, as Bob had warned, conscripted (or commandeered)— “Give this n****r some boots and a raincoat and ship him to the levee” (92)—mental clarity becomes a pressing requirement for Mann. His conscription is a matter of subordination rather than substitution, and on the motorized boat to the levee, he weighs perception against reflection. Mann considers the available options. These choices include murdering his escort. “He closed his eyes and again saw Heartfield come out on the narrow porch and down the steps. He heard again the two shots of his gun. But he shot at me fo Ah shot im! Then again he saw Lulu lying on the table with her arm hanging limp. Then he heard Peewee calling. Good-bye!” A feeling of “hate welled up in him; he saw the two soldiers in the front seat. Their heads were bent low. They might fin out any minute now … His gun nestled close to his thigh.” “Spose,” he asks himself, “Ah shot em n took the boat?” Mann’s thoughts have, however, tempered his feelings. Reflection overrides perception. “Naw! Naw! It would be better to wait till he got to the levee” to escape (95). That nearby levee breaks. Mann and his escort must return to the command post. The army assigns the motorized boats to rescue work and entrusts Mann and a young African American named Brinkley with one of these vessels. Their mission is to ferry people from the Red Cross Hospital

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to the safety of the hills. “As they neared the hospital Mann wondered about the boy at his side. Would he help him to get away? Could he trust him enough to tell?” Wright’s addition of a second pilot brilliantly figures African-American two-ness. Brinkley, as an innocent boy at Mann’s side or on the brink of Mann’s thoughts, figures one side of the older pilot’s stream of consciousness: Mann’s unadulterated thoughts. Direct intentions from unadulterated consciousness and indirect (or oblique) intentions from adulterated consciousness run side by side, with Mann trying to reconcile the two: “He tried to see Brinkley’s face, but the rain and darkness would not let him” (99). Yet, while the difference between direct and oblique intention plays a subsidiary role in judging such cases, the difference between avoiding harm and bringing aid plays a primary role in such judgments (Foot “PADDE” 29); and Wright’s “Down by the Riverside” posits relatable considerations when Mann selflessly helps people escape from the Red Cross Hospital. His actions testify not only to direct intentions overcoming their indirect counterparts but also to the provision of aid overcoming the avoidance of injury. While he is inside the building, the lights temporarily fuse, leaving him in total darkness. As if unobserved, Mann temporarily assumes the figure of Brinkley, with neither adulterated deliberation nor perception but solely unadulterated deliberation at work. “He forgot everything but that he must cut a hole through this ceiling to save people. Even the memory of Lulu and Heartfield was gone from him” (101). Mann’s direct intentions, which ignore (or override) the fact that his conscription falls below the voluntariness threshold, make him the most hospitable man at the hospital. “Charity,” as Foot observes, “requires that we take care to find out how to render assistance where we are likely to be called on to do so”; and one “see[s] virtue par excellence,” according to Foot’s definition, in Wright’s Mann, “who is prompt and resourceful in doing good” (“VV” 4). Mann goes beyond the charitable in completing his tasks despite (not because of) being ordered (or even asked) to do so by “the colonel” (100); and tellingly, Foot turns in her disquisition on virtues and vices to an American nonfiction novel, John Hersey’s A Single Pebble, to illustrate the combination par excellence of promptness and resourcefulness; literature, rather than philosophy, serves Foot’s needs. In Hersey’s book, an unnamed hydraulic engineer describes the rescue of an injured boy from the Chang Jiang in full spate. “It was the head tracker’s marvelous swift response that captured my admiration at first,”

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he recounts, “his split second solicitousness when he heard a cry of pain, his finding in mid-air, as it were, the only way to save the injured boy. But there was more to it than that. His action, which could not have been mulled over in his mind, showed a deep, instinctive love of life, a compassion, an optimism, which made me feel very good” (100–1). What this incident and the manner of its narration reveal, according to Foot, “is that a man’s virtue may be judged by his innermost desires as well as by his intentions; and this fits with our idea that a virtue such as generosity lies as much in someone’s attitudes as in his actions” (5). In the context of documentary fiction, Foot’s turn to Hersey cannot help but recall the philosophical Wright’s turn to Trigant Burrow. The Lake Zürich incident in Burrow’s The Social Basis of Consciousness—which depicts how social consciousness, the wish to serve and save others, can overpower the individual urge for self-preservation—inspired Wright with a set of thoughts. Yet, Foot’s interpretation of the episode recalled by Hersey differs from Wright’s interpretation of the episode recalled by Burrow: whereas Foot understands a perceptive form of satisfaction that acts merely in accordance with moral expectations, Wright understands a satisfaction by social consciousness of the deontological side of the dignitarian imperative; while Foot effectively allies herself with Nussbaum, Wright effectively allies himself with John Rawls. Moreover, as Howard’s interpretation of the hospital episode in “Down by the Riverside” helps to confirm, Wright’s Mann goes beyond the moral excellence documented by Burrow. “The only degree of cooperation between Mann and white people occurs between him and the Colonel, and this,” as Howard remarks, “involves a slave/master relationship. The Colonel’s goodwill is at once condescending and paternalistic, and it is only fitting that this unwitting patron, completely ignorant of the trials Mann must face for his life, blithely hands him the slip of paper that dooms him” (57). In the colonel’s defense, he does commend Mann—“You did well! I wont forget you! If you get out of this, come and see me, hear?” (104)—and the officer is unaware that the piece of paper he gives to Mann—on which is “the address of a woman with two children who called in for help” (104)—will confront his conscript with a potentially fatal trolley problem. Nevertheless, while chopping through the hospital ceiling, Mann, as an American citizen, who stands above the colonel, as an American commissioned officer, silently but structurally counteracts the officer’s dubitable goodwill.

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Back out on the water, Mann reads the note. The address is that of the post office. This coincidence has provoked much negative criticism. Having to return to the remaining Heartfields, who are sure to recognize him, seems to involve what Allen W. Wood would call the downright cartoonish. “Since its publication,” remarks Yarborough of Uncle Tom’s Children, “critics have argued that the collection is uneven, with certain stories more finely constructed and effective than others. Particular attention has been paid to awkward coincidences in the plotting, especially in ‘Down by the Riverside’” (xxix). Dan McCall agrees about collective unevenness but goes further: “The two middle stories of the collection, ‘Down by the Riverside’ and ‘Long Black Song,’ are of only secondary interest—the first marred by serious plotting difficulties and the second by passages of purple prose” (26). Edward Margolies confirms McCall’s criticism of Mann’s plight. “Down by the Riverside,” as the next story in the book after “Big Boy Leaves Home,” “is not nearly so successful,” he argues. “The plot becomes too contrived; coincidence is piled on coincidence, and the inevitability of his protagonist’s doom does not ring quite true” (63). In responding to these concerns, one can first point to that major aspect of documentary fiction, the promotion of factual adequacy above factual accuracy. A second rejoinder comes from Jack B. Moore, one that further evinces the appropriateness of trolley problems to minoritarian circumstances. “‘Down by the Riverside’ displays the inside of one black human being’s South, a world that is completely perverse, where only the worst that can possibly happen will happen,” explains Moore. “The plot is contrived because it reflects the black existence Wright portrays as absolutely rigged in the South, the victim’s doom does not quite ring true [to the mind of a liberal reader] because there is no reason for it—beyond the victim’s blackness” (136); and the Freudian perversity of that unreason, one can add, is reason enough for the majoritarian mindset of prewar Mississippi. Yarborough effectively concurs with Moore: “In ‘Big Boy Leaves Home’ and ‘Down by the Riverside,’ nature, a fate given to cruelly absurd coincidence, and Southern whites all conspire in unrelenting assaults on the bodies and spirits of blacks whose only crime is to be black and in the wrong place at the wrong time” (xxvi). The trolley problems of “Big Boy Leaves Home,” in which Morrison’s consciousness takes over from heterodiegetic narration in acts of free indirection, only for him to repeatedly face the direct choice between either killing or being killed, ought to prompt readerly reflection. Such

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contemplation evokes, on the one hand, the philosophical difficulties initially raised by Thomson in “Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem,” and on the other hand, the wide value-based objective approach to philosophy championed by Derek Parfit in On What Matters. The trolley problems in “Down by the Riverside” maintain this evocation, with Parfit’s Lifeboat immediately springing to mind. Neither of Wright’s opening tales from Uncle Tom’s Children is cartoonish. “Both highlight the paucity of available options through which blacks can maintain their humanity in the face of racism” (Yarborough xxvi; emphasis added). While racial prejudice attempts to eschew minoritarian dignity, Wright eschews neither minoritarian dignity nor the racist attempt to deny that essence. “Long Black Song,” the tale that follows “Down by the Riverside” in closing the first part of Uncle Tom’s Children, continues this philosophical tenor with Silas’s violent reaction to his wife’s sexual predation at the hands of a white salesman, but the story that closes the volume, “Bright and Morning Star,” as Yarborough notes, “leaves unresolved the tension with which Wright himself struggled between the nationalist strain in black culture and the integrationist imperative underlying the Communist party’s appeal to class solidarity” (xxviii). Indeed, Mann and Silas exhibit a profounder sense of dignity in sacrificing their lives than Johnny-Boy and Sue do in sacrificing their own in “Bright and Morning Star,” a story of multiracial communism. Whereas “choosing the terms of one’s own death in a world that refuses to let you live as a human being constitutes an existential triumph of no small order” (xxvi; emphasis added), as Yarborough remarks of Mann and Silas, the deaths of Johnny-Boy and Sue are overtly political and overly politicized. “If the proletariat desires the freedom and dignity it deserves,” according to Russell Carl Brignano’s persuasive reading of “Bright and Morning Star,” “it must be prepared to sacrifice its life for the cause” (65). Analyzing Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos (1954), which Wright published after permanently exiling himself to Europe, S.  Shankar traces how “abandoning both (black) race and (Western) culture, Wright chooses to make his stand on the ground of politics” (15). In describing this decision as “transnational and transracial,” Alexa Weik explains how “such a move is made possible only because of Wright’s anti-essentialist stance on race” (472). During the immediate postwar years, Wright’s philosophical viewpoint eclipsed Zora Neale Hurston’s anthropological (specifically Boasian) alternative. “Wright’s integrationist vision,” agrees Christopher Douglas, “had vanquished

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Hurston’s pluralist alternative view,” but “in their afterlives,” he adds, “her influence remained larger than his” (194). The present argument suggests that the reemergence of Wright’s integrationist vision is overdue. “In these challenging times,” as Barbara Foley rightly asserts, “it is all the more important that we bear in mind the mediations enabling Wright to connect ‘black lives’ to ‘all lives’” (352). Jerry W. Ward concurs: It is essential that Wright’s legacy, inside and outside the contexts of Black Lives Matter, be evaluated from the perspectives of many contexts, that we strive to construct holistic explanations (while agonizing that literacy pertaining to history, cultures, and social movements is slowly declining among American citizens), that the legacy not be endlessly betrayed by the Judas kiss of James Baldwin’s “Everybody’s Protest Novel.” (357)

Wright’s anti-essentialist position on race—a philosophical position that his (Kantian) formulation of essential dignity underpinned—antedated Wright’s textual foregrounding of politics, and by linking this stance to an anterior one, Wright even imbues Black Power with this fundamental philosophical position. This less politically tainted understanding of humankind, encapsulated by the purer version of human dignity in “Long Black Song,” and far more so in “Down by the Riverside,” dates not to the African-American father, as in Uncle Tom, but to the African grandfather. In Black Power, Hagerson, the “head man” (180) of the ruined Slave Market Castle in Osu, Ghana, figures this unalloyed understanding. “Mr. Hagerson was a brown-skinned man of seventy-odd, clad in a pair of baggy trousers and a frayed shirt,” relates Wright. “Had Mr. Hagerson been a bit taller, he could have been my grandfather. He had the same angular features, the same proud bearing, the same patient dignity that my grandfather had had” (181; emphasis added). Unencumbered by party politics, “Down by the Riverside” captures Wright’s (Kantian) formulation of essential dignity better than any other story in the volume or any of his subsequent works of fiction. As Saunders Redding avers, Wright’s “talent was to smite the conscience—and to smite the conscience of both white and black Americans” (53)—that blow resounding to the purity of a direct, or unadulterated, consciousness. In accordance with Redding’s metaphorical sense, the trolley problems in “Down by the Riverside” are the hammers that ring those repeated tolls, and the remaining Heartfields, as the purpose or aim of Mann’s (and Brinkley’s) rescue mission, elicit another such problem.

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Like Morrison in the previous story, Mann knows he faces the direct choice between either killing or being killed: “its mah life ergin theirs” (106). Ignoring the get-out clause provided by the colonel—“If you and the boy think you can save em, then do what you can. If you cant, then try to make it to the hills” (104; emphasis added)—Mann again breasts the current; he again forges upstream; for streams of consciousness read Mann versus the Mississippi River. Each conscious component of his two-ness, each aspect of his double vision, vies against the other. “He leaned forward to speak and touched Brinkley’s arm. The boat veered again, dodging an object.” Do you know the place? asks Brinkley. “Ah reckon so,” replies Mann (107). As their direction of travel suggests, however, Mann’s unadulterated consciousness, the pilot Brinkley, will keep them on course: they transit toward the point of the nabla instead of transiting between the widening sides of that delta. During this journey, despite the death of Lulu and their unborn child, and despite the circumstances of Henry Heartfield’s death, Mann reflects humanely on the dead man’s family. “Perhaps in a world where grounds for hatred are so valid,” submits Edwin Berry Burgum, “even so talented an author may be forgiven if he cannot present with equal skill the case for love and understanding.” To Burgum’s mind, a foretaste of dignity had supposedly seeded African Americans with a core of insistent anger; in consequence, Burgum “expect[s] that among all our national minorities the Negro will be the last to do so,” to develop with equal skill the case for love and understanding, “and that he will do so first in those areas of the working class where genuine friendships can be taken for granted” (“PD” 352). Mann’s reflective response to the postmaster’s family puts Burgum’s expectation to the test and finds that expectation condescendingly misplaced, because Mann’s mature reflections and resultant actions express an overpowering understanding of the human condition. Mann initially considers letting the remaining Heartfields die. “A hot wish rose in his blood, a wish they were gone. He wished that their white bodies were at the bottom of the black waters” (107–8). In “Who Turned the Trolley?” (2016), F. M. Kamm recounts a similar scenario, imagining that the only way for me to save five others from drowning is to let myself drown (by giving them a life preserver I need and could otherwise use). I could permissibly refuse to let myself drown and let the five drown instead. Yet it would also be permissible for me to let one other person drown, though he does not want me to, in order to save five others instead (by

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­ iving the five instead of the one a life preserver when I do not need it). I g would permissibly impose a cost on that one by not aiding him that I would permissibly not impose on myself. This, of course, is a case of letting someone die, and Thomson believes (as do I) that there is a moral difference between killing someone and letting him die. (30)

By choosing to keep a life preserver, that agent does not impose a cost on the other five people, agrees Thomson in “Kamm on the Trolley Problems,” because “there is a moral difference between killing someone and letting someone die” (121). As the lifeboat piloted by Mann and Brinkley approaches the post office, Mann appears to be alone with his thoughts (“Mann heard the motor race; he was gliding slowly over the water, going toward the house”), and the option of abandoning the remaining Heartfields remains open. Open, that is, until Mann’s unadulterated consciousness, as personified by the boy at his side, again breaks in from the brink. “Yuh reckon yuh kin make it?” asks Brinkley. “Reckon we kin save em?” Mann does not answer, but Brinkley, who holds the lifeboat steady against the building, urges his colleague to enter through the nearest window; and unadulterated consciousness, which was on the brink of Mann’s thoughts, takes over once more: “as though he were outside of himself watching himself, Mann felt himself stand up” (109). Apparently leaving Brinkley behind in the lifeboat, Mann holds a flashlight in one hand, using an axe in the other hand to lever himself up the outside of the tilted post office. As if armed with the axe, knowing it is either his life or their lives, and without unadulterated consciousness to counsel otherwise, Mann now considers murdering the Heartfields. Reaching the window, his thoughts are again so intense as to produce a physiological sensation: “Something hard began to press against the back of his head and he saw it all in a flash while staring at the white boy and hearing him scream, ‘Its the n****r!’” (110). Rather than being perceptively incapacitated—“At this point, Mann could have chosen to flee and let the wife and child die, but paralyzed by fatalism,” opines David Bakish, “he rescues them, thus assuring his own death” (29)—Mann is hard-­ pressed by his reflective aim for equilibrium, as his precarious position at the window and his aching head both testify. Mann has already dismissed the option of flight. His current choice is between killing and being killed. “Yes, now, if he could swing that axe they would never tell on him and the black waters of the flood would cover

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them forever and he could tell Brinkley he had not been able to find them and the whites would never know he had killed a white man” (110). On the one hand, Mann still embodies an adulterated consciousness, with Brinkley being offstage; on the other hand, Mann faces his own death in saving the Heartfields. The resulting deliberation produces a concomitant feeling by which Mann’s “body grew taut with indecision” (110). This trolley problem is difficult, and Mann is tense. Carrying through his initial option, however, might produce a further demand. “Yes, now, he would swing that axe and they would never tell and he had his gun and if Brinkley found out he would point the gun at Brinkley’s head. He saw himself in the boat with Brinkley; he saw himself pointing the gun at Brinkley’s head; he saw himself in the boat going away” (111). Heartfields’ son, as a voice of direct consciousness, promotes Mann’s first option. “His muscles flexed and the axe was over his head and he heard the white boy screaming, ‘It’s the n****r! It’s the n****r!’” Yet, with his belief in human dignity intact, Mann’s indecision ends in a revolutionary flash of inspiration, which ensures that he gambles on the other, diametrically opposed, option, the gamble of chancing his own life to save the Heartfields. “He felt himself being lifted violently up and swung around as though by gravity of the earth itself and flung face downward into black space. A loud commotion filled his ears: his body rolled over and over and he saw the flash-light for an instant, its one eye whirling: then he lay flat, stunned; he turned over, pulled to his knees, dazed, surprised, shocked” (111). The flood has upended the post office; this stunning outer intervention ratifies Mann’s inner moral resolve; and that endorsement overturns the single white eye of direct consciousness. He dismisses his first option. “Mann saw the axe, but seemed not to realize that he had been about to use it. He knew what had happened now; the house had tilted, had tilted in the rushing black water” (111), as if into the unadulterated stream of Mann’s consciousness, and he is now determined on a course of action. Indirect self-defense in response to this situation—rather than the defense of his family and the direct self-defense that Henry Heartfield’s attack had forced Mann to take—would be akin to murdering his acceptance of human dignity. The rationalization from Mann’s unadulterated stream of consciousness, in the guise of Brinkley’s voice from the window, (re)calls him from the brink: “Yuh fin em? Say, yuh fin em?” Under conscientious scrutiny—“He turned the spot on the window and saw a black face and beyond the face a path of light shooting out over the water” (111)—Mann rejects murdering the Heartfields.

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Mann’s enlightenment transcends the bounds of racial constructs. “Naw … Naw… He could not kill now; he could not kill if someone were looking” (111–12; emphasis original). P.  Jay Delmar argues that Wright’s protagonist in “Down by the Riverside” cannot resolve the dilemmas that face him, “because his personality contains serious weaknesses: in situations which require action, Mann is indecisive; in crises which scream for Mann to confide in others, his indecision forces him to maintain an isolated individuality.” Reading Brinkley as Mann’s unadulterated consciousness emphasizes how Mann has no one to confide in when faced with killing, letting die, or saving the remaining Heartfields: he alone must decide what to do. “Unlike Big Boy who acts without thinking,” continues Delmar in compounding his slightly misjudged remarks, “Mann thinks too much, and he depends too much upon himself” (6). As the previous analysis of “Big Boy Leaves Home” shows, however, Morrison soon learns in extremis to think before acting; and, as the analysis above makes plain, Mann weighs his options, learning to extract himself from the imperatives of capitalism and race. In effect, Mann resolves to place ethics above economics, humankind above racial kind. “This book is about hatreds” (32), rails Hurston, but her judgment is blinkered. Mann saves the three Heartfields. He upholds the deontological as well as the expectational side of the dignitarian imperative. In doing so, and in transferring the Heartfields from the dangers of the spate to the safety of the upstream hills, Mann is still “speeding against the current” (113). In continuing to breast that flow, in continuing to go toward the point of the nabla, Mann’s unadulterated consciousness has prevailed against its otherwise prevailing counterpart, the adulterated consciousness seeded by majoritarian intolerance. In short, while rescuing the remaining Heartfields, Mann humanizes a dehumanized situation in answering a trolley problem, which, like the other such dilemmas in the tale, is neither aesthetically nor ethically impoverished: the literary trolley problems of “Down by the Riverside” do not suffer from the descriptive destitution that Wood so readily detects in their philosophically generated counterparts. Minoritarians would often seem to have a greater claim to the beneficial choices from circumambient trolley problems because of subjugation, because of sociopolitical contexts that usually guarantee majoritarians the greater (rather than the morally more justified) claim to these options. Like every other African-American figure in Uncle Tom’s Children, Mann is “a stupid, blundering character” (32), complains Hurston, but for

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Mann, the question of whether murdering people is worse than fatally abandoning them does not merely cross his mind, it occupies his thoughts. He is above all mindful. Mann’s radical decision, the revolutionary essence of which Wright so skillfully adumbrates with the upending of the post office, resolves this mental engagement: Mann chooses to save the remaining Heartfields at the probable cost of his own life. Wright’s thoughtful protagonist not only possesses the capacity for morality but also acts morally. Killing the remaining Heartfields was Mann’s best means of guaranteeing his own survival. Letting them die also offered a chance of personal safety. Yet, he treats the postmaster’s family as a Kantian would treat them, as an end rather than as a means. In “The Trolley Problem,” almost a decade after publishing “Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem,” Thomson revisits the question of why “the bystander may turn his trolley, though the surgeon may not remove the young man’s lungs, kidneys, and heart?” Because she “find[s] it particularly puzzling that the bystander may turn his trolley,” Thomson calls this scenario The Trolley Problem. “Those who find it particularly puzzling that the surgeon may not operate are cordially invited to call it The Transplant Problem instead.” Having left this nomenclature knowingly unresolved, Thomson remarks how “‘kill’ and ‘let die’ are too blunt to be useful tools for the solving of this problem. We ought to be looking within killings and savings for the ways in which the agents would be carrying them out.” In conducting this search, Thomson explicitly turns to Immanuel Kant. “It would be no surprise, I think, if a Kantian idea occurred to us at this point,” she observes. “Kant said: ‘Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only’” (1401). Thomson now tests this dictum. Suppose an agent is confronted with a choice between doing nothing, in which case five die, or engaging in a certain course of action, in which case the five live, but one dies. Then perhaps we can say: If the agent chooses to engage in the [second] course of action, then he uses the one to save the five only if, had the one gone out of existence just before the agent started, the agent would have been unable to save the five. (“TP” 1402)

This is the situation when the surgeon uses the single person as a means only; that person’s death facilitates the surgeon’s objective; that death results directly from that aim. In contrast, “the agent in Bystander at the Switch does not need the one track workman on the right-hand track if he is to save his five” (“TP” 1402). The bystander can save the five workers even if their colleague on the other track does not exist. The bystander

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does not use the single worker as a means only; the single worker’s death does not facilitate the bystander’s objective; that death results indirectly from that aim. In a relatable manner, in Wright’s “Down by the Riverside,” Mann resists both treating others and being treated himself as a means. His personal resistance against such treatment embraces means-only usage by ideological as well as by repressive state apparatuses. The colonel at the hospital, to whom Mann is subordinated, but whom Mann tacitly resists in two ways—firstly, in Kantian terms, by completing his task despite (not because of) being ordered (or even asked) to do so; second, in structural terms, by standing over the colonel—personifies a repressive state apparatus (the army). Elder Murray, who prays for Lulu’s salvation when visiting the Manns before their embarkation, personifies an ideological state apparatus (Christianity). Mann tacitly resists this apparatus too. For, while retaining respect for Murray, Mann’s deference is severely tested—“he wished with all his heart that Elder Murray would hurry up and get through with the prayer, for he wanted to be in that boat” (72)—and found wanting. Christianity in the prewar Southern States, as a majoritarian discourse, casts a minoritarian as a means only, and Mann’s acceptance of such treatment is no longer automatic. For Howard, the protagonists of each story in Uncle Tom’s Children dismiss their forebear’s virtues, leaving these characters without “any exceptional gifts with which to confront the hostilities of the world” (47–48). This lack “makes them quite different from their progenitor Uncle Tom, whose Christian patience is intended to redeem the nightmare of slavery and leave the reader with hope.” Mann’s virtues, observes Howard, “are not as easy to recognize or admire as Uncle Tom’s are,” with Howard arguing that Wright “leaves the reader with only the nightmare […] of Southern life” (48). To elucidate Mann’s virtuous qualities requires an innovative approach, however, and a philosophically inflected hermeneutic helps to supply this need. This interpretive perspective implies that Mann’s virtues derive from his unadulterated, rather than from his adulterated, consciousness. Although such terminology would be alien to him, Mann possesses and practices a Kantian dignity; in doing so, Mann is an avowed Brother before being an avowed Christian. Mann’s ready acceptance of Elder Murray’s interrogatory greeting, “Tha yuh, Brother Mann?” (70), supports this interpretation. Thus, Mann’s qualities as a Brother Mann are difficult to identify because they are not only profound but also exceptional.

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H. L. Mencken, that early influence on Wright, would have appreciated these subtleties. “Mencken was especially angry with the Negro because his homage to ‘ecclesiastical racketeers’ was at odds with his decency, dignity, and innate common sense” (Charles Scruggs 44). “The Burden of Credulity” (1931), a short article for Opportunity, reveals the ferocity of Mencken’s anger. “In brief,” he avers of African Americans, “the race is marked by extraordinary decency,” and “even the hog-wallow Christianity that it commonly patronizes has not sufficed to degrade it.” Mencken “wish[es] I could add that this Christianity is otherwise worthy of a self-­ respecting people, but I fear that I cannot. As a matter of fact, it is extraordinarily stupid, ignorant, barbaric, and preposterous.” Borrowed at the outset “from the lowest class of Southern whites,” this form of Christianity “has been so further debased by moron Negro theologians that, on its nether levels, it is now a disgrace to the human race” (41). To Mencken, “these theologians constitute a body of bold and insatiable parasites, and getting rid of them is a problem that will daunt all save the bravest of the future leaders of black America. They fill their victims with ideas fit only for the jungle, and for that office they take a toll that is cruel and debilitating.” Monetarily, “what it amounts to annually I don’t know, but it undoubtedly makes up the heaviest expenditure of the Negro people,” and “all they get for it is continued subjugation to the superstitions of the slave quarters” (41). The archaic morphology of Christianity is at best an unfortunate bequest, at worst a congenital disease. In “Down by the Riverside,” writes Critic B.  Eugene McCarthy, “Brother Mann, a generic form of address for a black man, becomes an idealization of physical endurance, courage, and Christian compassion, thrown into a world of flood/chaos” (733). Nevertheless, Mann’s “efforts at compassion, his Christian reliance on the humanity of the ironically named Heartfield family, his trust in the Biblical word—all fail utterly.” In consequence, he discovers that any “presumption of human compassion” based on religious edicts “is abrogated” (734). Wright’s protagonist learns to appreciate the potential of the great flood to undercut class differences, on the one hand, and to bespeak the ultimate moral bedrock or standard of God (with the Old Man as bringer of life and death), on the other. Minoritarians must resist at once ideological and repressive state apparatuses. Kant’s dignitarian imperative, which is an invitation rather than a summons, approaches that ethical standard in a secularly authoritative manner, and Mann’s relatable postdiluvial attitudes amount to a success rather than to the failure of which McCarthy writes.

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Mann’s possession and practice of Kantian dignity replaces the inculcations of ignorant and preposterous Christianity. He frees himself from their mental impress. In Taking Rights Seriously (1977), philosopher Ronald Dworkin summarizes the fight for human rights with the words “rights ‘trump’ utilities” (ix), an aphorism that Thomson then quotes in “The Trolley Problem” (1404). In Wright’s “Down by the Riverside,” however, Mann’s active recognition of dignity allows utilities to trump rights. Even so, “we can still say that rights trump utilities,” as Thomson explains of Bystander at the Switch, “if we can find a further feature of what the bystander does if he turns the trolley (beyond the fact that he maximizes utility) which itself trumps the right, and thus makes it permissible to proceed” (“TP” 1406). Mann’s active recognition of dignity—his rescue of the postmaster’s family, because he wants to, rather than in deference to orders, warnings, threats, or dangers—manifests this further feature in “Down by the Riverside.” “It is commonly taught by the schoolmen that self-preservation is the first law of nature,” notes Burrow. “I do not believe it,” he avers. I believe that the instinct of tribal preservation is by far the dominant urge among us. I believe that this instinct takes precedence over the impulse of self-maintenance to a degree that renders individual life insignificant in comparison. In face of the reflex assertion of the impulse of race-preservation the individual is brushed heedlessly aside. A group of miners will without thought descend one after another into a gas-filled chamber to rescue a fellow-­workman from death and one after another share the fate of their comrade. We all know countless instances of this rescue-impulse as a response to the organic instinct of race unity. (127)

“The organic behests of our common societal instinct” (127n1), as Burrow identifies in the Lake Zürich incident, exemplifies the same impulse. Yet, as “How Uncle Tom’s Children Grew” testifies, Wright eschews the terms race and instinct. In referring to race, Burrow assuredly means human race, but Wright avoids the dangers of misinterpretation by positing the influence of “social consciousness” (15). The concept of consciousness overwrites that of instinct, and “Down by the Riverside” brings this revision to the fore. Hence, Richard Wright’s moral sense is closer to Derek Parfit’s and Pablo Gilabert’s rich and deep respective understandings of the Kantian ideal of dignity than to the related understandings of Trigant Burrow, Henry James, or even Immanuel Kant himself.

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When Mrs. Newsome’s first ambassador fails her, with Strether’s eventual escape from her metaphysical grip, she sends Sarah Pocock, her married daughter, as his replacement. “It is a necessary irony,” observes Julie Rivkin, “that Mrs. Newsome,” the figure who sets this logic of delegation in motion, “is the one least able to acknowledge its existence. As the absent authority who stands behind all the novel’s ambassadors, she sends her delegates off with the express understanding that they must alter nothing of that for which they stand in. She wants a representative who can fill in for her, maintain a likeness without a difference, who can deliver the message she speaks ‘to the letter’” (67). “Strether’s status as ambassador,” agrees Sarah Wilson, “rests precisely upon Mrs. Newsome’s assumption that her positioning and her thinking can be reproduced by an emissary, an assumption that endures at the end of the novel, when she sends her daughter to Paris in her stead” (518). Sarah Pocock is her mother’s “incarnation” (Collin Meissner 138). As the enlightened Strether explains of Mrs. Newsome to Maria Gostrey: That’s just her difficulty—that she doesn’t admit surprises. It’s a fact that, I think, describes and represents her; and it falls in with what I tell you—that she’s all, as I’ve called it, fine cold thought. She had, to her own mind, worked the whole thing out in advance, and worked it out for me as well as for herself. Whenever she has done that, you see, there’s no room left; no margin, as it were, for any alteration. She’s filled as full, packed as tight, as she’ll hold, and if you wish to get anything more or different either out or in——” (392)

“To be able to ‘work the whole thing out in advance’ suggests Mrs. Newsome deals with knowledge as though it were a quantifiable thing with which she is filled to the brim,” argues Meissner. “And this is exactly how Mrs. Newsome approaches the world, not just as though reality were a finite quantity one could contain, but that mastery depends upon containment, depends, that is, on eliminating life itself” (134). As a refined incarnation of her mother, Sarah Pocock unwittingly reduces quantifiable containment to the absurd. Madame de Vionnet offers to guide Sarah around Paris, a city that Mrs. Newsome’s daughter has never visited, but Sarah unabashedly refuses the proposal. “‘Oh, you’re too good; but I don’t think I feel quite helpless. I have my brother—and these American friends. And then, you know, I’ve been to Paris. I know Paris,’” she insists, “in a tone that breathed a certain chill on Strether’s

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heart” (279; emphasis original). This feeling arises notwithstanding Strether’s decisive escape from Sarah’s mother. For, “despite his multiple and fluid descriptions of Chad, of Madame de  Vionnet, of Paris, he is unable to penetrate Mrs. Newsome’s interpretive fortifications” (Meissner 134), as newly re-presented in Sarah’s person. “I haven’t touched her,” admits Strether to Gostrey of Mrs. Newsome. “She won’t be touched. I see it now as I’ve never done; and she hangs together with a perfection of her own,” he continues, “that does suggest a kind of wrong in any change in her composition” (393; emphasis original). Strether simply and admittedly cannot accept “the whole moral and intellectual being or block” that is Mrs. Newsome. “One never does, I suppose,” concurs Gostrey, “realise in advance, in such a case, the size, as you may say, of the block. Little by little it looms up. It has been looming for you more and more, till at last you see it all.” Yes, “‘I see it all,’” Strether absently echoes, “while his eyes might have been fixing some particularly large iceberg in a cool blue northern sea. ‘It’s magnificent!’” For the heterodiegetic narrator, this concluding exclamation is “rather odd” (393); whereas Strether appreciates, though decries, the narrator cannot appreciate, and can merely decry, Mrs. Newsome’s principled loyalty to quantifiable containment. As Ross Posnock argues, “James makes us experience how life is not a transparent given,” but is “itself dependent on the production of narratives derived from cultural imagery” (67). Meissner agrees. “It is perhaps here, in James’s documentation of the process through which one’s understanding of experience and of one’s self” is gained, “that the subtle power of Jamesian hermeneutics gains its full force and reveals its deeply political consequences for the individual” (4). James’s interpretive power is certainly subtle—and our lives are, to varying degrees and to varying standards, dependent on the production of narratives derived from cultural imagery—but that subtlety, and those concomitant narrative productions, concern the ethereal far more than the tangible materiality and worldly strife with which most people, including authors such as Wright, must deal. Meissner then asks and answers two questions in expanding on his hermeneutical suggestion concerning James. What imagery provides James’s source? To what extent can James’s resulting revelations undermine the certitude of American sociopolitical ideology? “Strether has finally become himself and America is exposed in such a way that it can never again be for him, and readers of experience, what it once was,” avers Meissner. “In effect, Strether’s embassy overthrows the self-aggrandizing certitude

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which had come to characterize American cultural and political ideology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century” (4–5). As Wright would discover to his surprise and delight, so James had suggested concerning different instances of class, culture, and politics: for, as Meissner relates, “Paris relentlessly contests and challenges Strether’s imported notions of behavior,” imports “of genteel hypocrisy characterized by a deceitful moral prudery” (5). In fine, concludes Meissner, the implacable rationality of America as an enlarging industrial, technological, and political force stunts personal maturation, thereby “undermin[ing] the country’s celebrated freedom to self-determination by consistently reminding the individual that things must be done ‘by the book,’ to paraphrase Mrs. Newsome” (5). Yet, as minoritarians constantly experience and as Wright brilliantly discloses in Uncle Tom’s Children, limitations on self-determination often involve either a lack or a perversion of morality: a majoritarian combination of moral illiteracy, nescience, and denial betrays doing things by either a religious book or an ethical treatise. “If Wright is pessimistic at the possibility of transforming the power of southern myth and tradition,” argues Terrence Tucker, “Wright still promotes a move towards self-­actualization.” This promotion is “generally expressed through rage,” which “leads to the beginnings of a clear critique of white supremacy” (107). More accurately adduced of “Down by the Riverside” and as Wright’s philosophically inflected literature surely intends, Mann’s ethical profundity offers a far subtler critique of intolerance than Tucker believes. Under fatally testing circumstances, while not only retaining the capacity for morality but also acting morally, Mann allows reflection to countermand perception. Furthermore, having saved the remaining Heartfields, Mann anticipates his own outcome from the trolley problem that encompasses both him and his charges: operating the lifeboat alongside Brinkley, approaching the safety supposedly offered by the hills ahead, “Mann knew” the Heartfields “were behind him” (113). Portentousness imbues Mann’s attendant thoughts. His thinking concerns the postmaster’s family as representatives of governance and retribution; and his intensity of thought again produces a physiological sensation: “He felt them all over his body, and especially like something hard and cold weighing on top of his head; weighing so heavily that it seemed to blot out everything but one hard, tight thought: They got me now.” Mann has been instrumental in rescuing the remaining Heartfields, but they will be instrumental in significantly shortening his life. Nonetheless,

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as with his trolley problem while rescuing the remaining Heartfields from the post office, reflection outweighs perception, and Brinkley, that figure of innocence, that figure of Mann’s unadulterated consciousness, reinstates and restates his presence: “‘Theres the hills!’ said Brinkley. Green slopes lay before him in the blurred dawn” (113)—him, the objective form of he, melding Mann and Brinkley into a single consciousness. This vague, blurred prospect, or dawning, soon turns into a vivid, sharp actuality or ending. Having disembarked, the two pilots go their separate ways, with the postmaster’s son identifying Mann as “the n****r that killed father!” (116). In response to being placed under military guard, and despite Brinkley’s absence, Mann continues to suppress vestigial murmurings from his adulterated, indirect, or oblique consciousness. Mann still has his gun, the weapon that accounted for Henry Heartfield (“each step he took he felt his pistol jostling gently against his thigh”), but the perception of its possession provokes no thought of armed resistance. Instead, “a thought circled round and round in his mind, circled so tightly he could hardly think it! They goin t kill me … They goin t kill me …” (117). Yet, Mann does manage to think it, does manage to contemplate his own death. Direct thought overcomes indirect consciousness; self-­ effacement promises to overcome self-defeat; Mann disdains his pistol: he submits to a search of his person and allows the military authorities to confiscate the gun. Meeting his expectations, Mann’s defense of self-defense—“Ah didn’t mean t kill im! Ah swear fo Awmighty Gawd, Ah didn’t … He shot at me!” (121)—curries no favor with the authorities; and hereafter, on his way to the solders’ camp for execution, Mann’s thoughts produce a dazzling apostrophe: He walked blindly with bent back, his mouth dripping blood, his arms dangling loose. There were four of them and he was walking in between. Tears clogged his eyes. Down the slope to his right was a wobbly sea of brown water stretching away to a trembling sky. And there were boats, white boats, free boats, leaping and jumping like fish. There were boats and they were going to kill him. The sun was shining, pouring showers of yellow into his eyes. Two soldiers floated in front of him, and he heard two walking in back. He was between, walking, and the sun dropped spangles of yellow into his eyes. They goin t kill me! (122)

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Mann’s thoughts at once invoke the democratic irony of a sun-spangled banner and recall Frederick Douglass’s apostrophe to the sails from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (1845). Douglass’s two apostrophic paragraphs, which the white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison praises in his preface to the volume as the “most thrilling” of the “many passages of great eloquence and power” (8) that distinguish the book, describe the outlook from his slave quarters on the farm of the infamously violent “n****r-breaker” (54) Edward Covey. Our house stood within a few rods of the Chesapeake Bay, whose broad bosom was ever white with sails from every quarter of the habitable globe. Those beautiful vessels, robed in purest white, so delightful to the eye of freemen, were to me so many shrouded ghosts, to terrify and torment me with thoughts of my wretched condition. I have often, in the deep stillness of a summer’s Sabbath, stood all alone upon the lofty banks of that noble bay, and traced, with saddened heart and tearful eye, the countless number of sails moving off to the mighty ocean. The sight of these always affected me powerfully. My thoughts would compel utterance; and there, with no audience but the Almighty, I would pour out my soul’s complaint, in my rude way, with an apostrophe to the moving multitude of ships:— “You are loosed from your moorings, and are free; I am fast in my chains, and am a slave! You move merrily before the gentle gale, and I sadly before the bloody whip! You are freedom’s swift-winged angels, that fly round the world; I am confined in bands of iron! O that I were free!” (59)

Just as Douglass’s apostrophe, which connotes his direct intention to be free from bondage, anticipates both his subsequent acts of rebellion and his final escape from slavery, so Mann’s apostrophe, which connotes his direct intention to be free from subordination, anticipates both his subsequent act of rebellion and his ultimate escape from oppression. Under the authoritarian custody of a military escort, Mann begins his final journey in a state of blindness, but his feelings of despair realize a stunningly clear resolution: he decides to die on his own terms. “There is no indication,” complains Steven J.  Rubin of Uncle Tom’s Children, “that what Wright’s protagonists have done will in any way affect the future of the American system and its inherent irrationality.” These characters “do not leave a society that will profit from their action, but one which is described by Wright in almost every instance as meaningless and incoherent. In a world that has denied them all forms of human

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dignity, Wright’s black heroes react with blind and futile fury” (409). While identifying the importance of dignity to the African-American cause that Wright promotes, Rubin surely asks too much, even of Mann. Rational in the face of the irrational, Mann does not flatter himself with institutional or systemic pretensions; rather, his clarity of mind manifests and elicits self-effacing wisdom, self-effacing wisdom that spurns compliant self-defeat in championing defiant self-actualization. Any institutional and systemic effects, as Wright’s later life would testify in confirming the philosophical tenor of his literary creations, were of his own making.

Notes 1. “The Trolley Problem” is hereafter cited parenthetically as “TP.” 2. Citing Bystander at the Switch, which he renames Side Track, Parfit agrees with Thomson’s assertion that there is no Principle of Moral Inertia. “In Thomson’s imagined case,” he writes, “the existing state of affairs is that a runaway train is threatening to kill five people. As Thomson assumed, we have no prima facie duty not to interfere with this state of affairs. We could justifiably redirect this train so that it would kill fewer people.” In Parfit’s alternative but similar scenario, “an asteroid is moving towards a million people” in an American city, but with the use of technology, the president can redirect this threat toward a less populated area. “The President has no prima facie duty not to interfere with this state of affairs,” argues Parfit. “He could justifiably redirect this asteroid so that it would kill fewer people” (OWM 3:386). 3. Ironically, considering how Bob was cheated when selling the Manns’ mule, the authorities promise to recompense Mann for the appropriated lifeboat: “We can give you thirty-five dollars as soon as things are straightened out.” What is more, the authorities’ reason for commandeering the lifeboat echoes Mann’s reason for accepting Bob’s offering: “We had to take your boat,” an army officer tells him. “We were short of boats” (91).

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion: Be Reasonable

With ever watchful eyes and bearing scars, visible and invisible, I headed North, full of a hazy notion that life could be lived with dignity. —Richard Wright, Black Boy, 228.

“Are the[re] circumstances in which the preservation of one’s own life is a duty?” asks Philippa Foot. “Sometimes it is so, for sometimes it is what is owed to others that should keep a man from destroying himself, and then he may act out of a sense of duty” (“VV” 13). Approaching the end of Richard Wright’s “Down by the Riverside” in Uncle Tom’s Children, Peewee and Grannie shelter in a relief camp; they owe their futures, as do the remaining Heartfields, to Mann. This diverse group of people required Mann to preserve his own life; he fulfilled that duty; but now under military custody, Mann can help them no more. To save their lives, Mann has forfeited his own, and perceptive equilibrium registers that sacrifice: “His fear subsided into a cold numbness.” In its turn, however, as free indirection indicates, this collapse facilitates rational thought. “Yes, now! Yes, through the trees? Right thu them trees! Gawd! They were going to kill him. Yes, now, he would die! He would die before he would let them kill him.” Mann makes his final decision. “Ahll die fo they kill me! Ahll die” (123; emphasis original). Mann has attained reflective equilibrium.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Wainwright, Kantian Dignity and Trolley Problems in the Literature of Richard Wright, American Literature Readings in the 21st Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40216-6_7

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“There belongs to wisdom only that part of knowledge which is within the reach of any ordinary adult human being,” avers Foot. “Knowledge that can be acquired only by someone who is clever or who has access to special training is not counted as part of wisdom.” Mann’s self-effacing wisdom precludes both cleverness and the “special training” endured under majoritarian rule. Mann is simply humane. “So, as both Aristotle and Aquinas insisted, wisdom is to be contrasted with cleverness because cleverness is the ability to take the right steps to any end, whereas wisdom is related only to good ends, and to human life in general rather than to the ends of particular arts” (“VV” 6). So, as both Aristotelian arete ̄ and Thomist virtus refer at once to arts, to moral virtues, “and even to excellences of the speculative intellect” (“VV” 2), Wright’s essential triumph in “Down by the Riverside” is Mann’s controversially good, or challengingly honorable, preference for self-effacement over formal execution. He escapes his guards, runs “straight” toward the Mississippi River, takes no avoiding action, and “hear[s] a shot” (123). As previously noted, Zora Neale Hurston thinks Mann is “stupid” (32), but his final decision argues otherwise. Wright’s virtuous protagonist is reflectively wise. It is “quite wrong,” explains Foot, “to suggest that wisdom cannot be a moral virtue because virtue must be within the reach of anyone who really wants it and some people are too stupid to be anything but ignorant even about the most fundamental matters of human life.” In reality, “some people are wise without being at all clever or well informed: they make good decisions and they know, as we say, ‘what’s what’” (“VV” 6). Individuals tend to be attached to their own interests, and although a degree of concern for oneself and for loved ones is morally acceptable, as Mann’s final decision effectively counsels, “there is no general virtue of self-love” (“VV” 3). Put more forcefully, “if people were as much attached to the good of others as they are to their own good there would no more be a general virtue of benevolence” (“VV” 9). Similarly, if people cared as much about the rights of others as they care about their own rights, there would no more be a general virtue of justice. Like most people in most situations, Wright’s Mann does not inquire in a detached manner about ethical values, but unlike many people in many situations, he tempers acting by the (Jamesian) book. Mann goes beyond what Lewis Lambert Strether, Henry James, and (by implication) Martha C.  Nussbaum understand as the basis of Mrs. Newsome’s (and Kant’s) moralism. What is more, Mann’s implicit appreciation of the absolute worth of dignity, which embraces minoritarians and majoritarians alike,

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includes those whom certain philosophers would otherwise exclude from humanity. Kant’s Formula of Humanity as End in Itself “may give us reasons [for] refusing to look at the world in the way trolley problems tend to induce us to look at it” (“HEI” 80), claims Allen W. Wood. In fact, the Kantian ideal of a realm of ends provides an even more direct route to the same conclusions. It implies that we should not think about moral problems in terms of trade-offs between competing human ends, but should try to understand the answer to every problem as one that treats all people as ends, and leaves out no human ends except those that exclude themselves from the harmonious system (or realm) of all rational ends. (“HEI” 80–81; emphasis added)

According to Wood’s interpretation, racists and sexists exclude themselves from this ideal world, and while Wright offers numerous examples of such self-exclusion, such as the bestial Morrie from “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow” and the fanatical Henry Heartfield from “Down by the Riverside,” Mann not only identifies dignity with a capacity for morality but also makes dignity contingent on acting morally. People ought always to treat other people in helpful and respectful ways. Mann retains a wide value-based objective view that embraces both the fundamental principle of Kantian dignity and its notion of rational consent. “Self-respecting persons insist on receiving just treatment, for they firmly believe that in virtue of their moral status they are entitled to such treatment,” as Tommie Shelby observes. “They do not believe that they must earn this treatment through, say, meritorious action or good character. They know that their capacity for moral agency alone is sufficient to establish their right to equal justice, and this conviction functions for them as an unshakeable basis of self-worth” (527–28). In Uncle Tom’s Children, “Wright has his characters believe that, somehow, whites will recognize their dilemma and show some mercy,” notes William Howard. “This hope, of course, is against hope; for invariably the characters’ instinctive distrust proves to have been the best directive for a course of action” (56–57). When one accepts Mann’s notion of dignity, however, worldliness overwrites naivety. For Howard, Mann’s “original instincts suggest the more appropriate survival technique,” he would do “far better to shun whites” (57). Finally, however, the rational (and, in this ratiocinative sense, more than instinctual) Mann does not exclude those who would unwittingly exclude themselves from interpersonal relations as envisaged by Wood. Mann’s self-effacing wisdom triumphs over both his instincts and his impulses.

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Mann’s conscious decision undoubtedly evokes Christian martyrdom, but that evocation, as knowledge of H. L. Mencken’s influence on Wright adduces, is unquestionably equivocal.1 The final scene of “Down by the Riverside,” observes Keneth Kinnamon, “hints that Mann may be considered a black Christ, a common figure in black writing about lynch victims.” In this guise, “as Mann goes to his execution, he has difficulty walking, and the soldiers guarding him have a mocking, Roman callousness” (ERW 93). Moreover, the story closes with an open-ended description of Mann’s dead body—“it rolled heavily down the wet slope and stopped about a foot from the water’s edge; one black palm sprawled limply outward and upward, trailing in the brown current …” (124)— “that may suggest a Crucifixion image” (ERW 93). Concerning reflective or perceptive equilibrium, however, the soldiers’ bullets, in prefiguring this martyrdom, lastly and decisively penetrate the bodily organ that counts above all others: “bullets hit his side, his back, his head” (123). Tragically, despite a flood of almost biblical proportions, a spate that obliquely proffered a racial and social leveling, despite the Old Man as bringer of life and death appearing to bespeak the ultimate moral bedrock, or standard of God, and despite deaths such as those of Mann and Henry Heartfield, the race war continues. The irony that resonates between “Down by the Riverside,” as the title of the story, and “Down by the Riverside,” as the title of the African-American spiritual sung within that story, underlines this tragedy. That chanting arises once Elder Murray has finished praying for Lulu’s deliverance. “Murray stood up and began to sing. The others chimed in softly” (72): Ahm gonna lay down mah sword n shiel Down by the riverside Down by the riverside Down by the riverside Ahm gonna lay down mah sword n shiel Down by the riverside Ah ain gonna study war no mo … Ah ain gonna study war no mo Ah ain gonna study war no mo Ah ain gonna study war no mo Ah ain gonna study war no mo Ah ain gonna study war no mo Ah ain gonna study war no mo … (73)

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Defying that conflict, Lulu, whose body was swept away when the Mississippi River inundated the Red Cross Hospital, and Mann, whose body was riddled with army bullets, are reunited, with his corpse finishing down by the riverside, one palm sprawling in the “brown” water (124). Brought down physically by the Old Man, yet deconstructing the antinomic segregation of race, what is current, or left alive, is neither black nor white. Poststructuralist avant la lettre, Wright’s “Down by the Riverside” offers a philosophically inflected literary response to life under oppression, a value-based objective lesson that contrasts starkly with the subjective lesson offered by Henry James’s The Ambassadors. “Nussbaum handles notions such as the good life, moral elevation, and reason,” complain Liesbeth Korthals Altes and Hanna Meretoja, “as if deconstruction […] was no more than ripples in the pool” (606). Notwithstanding this shortsightedness, as Korthals Altes and Hanna Meretoja concede, Nussbaum’s influence on literary studies retains distinct value. On the one hand, her work “has done a lot to support interest in the arts and literature […] on the level of national and international education and culture policies” (607). On the other hand, her “insight in the importance of developing our capacity for emotions and imagination ties in with current research” (607), such as Mark L. Johnson’s investigations into the ethical implications of cognitive science. Nussbaum’s self-­ avowed “conviction,” as expressed in Poetic Justice, is “that storytelling and literary imagining are not opposed to rational argument, but can provide essential ingredients in a rational argument” (xv). Put plainly, “I defend the literary imagination precisely because it seems to me an essential ingredient of an ethical stance that asks us to concern ourselves with the good of other people whose lives are distant from our own” (xvi). “The stakes are high” (614), believe Korthals Altes and Meretoja. If it could be empirically proved that literature has cognitive, social, and ethical benefits for individuals and society and, more specifically, that engaging with literature cultivates critical and imaginative skills that are indispensable to well-functioning democratic societies, this would offer substantial support for re-establishing literature’s role in education, for instance, and for such programmes that assign literary reading to a variety of target groups, from detainees and people suffering from depression to medical doctors and other care professionals. (614–15)

Nussbaum’s “preferred version of the ethical stance derives from Aristotle, but everything I say here,” she avers in Poetic Justice, “could be

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accommodated by a Kantianism modified so as to give the emotions a carefully demarcated cognitive role” (xvi). Parfit’s eschewal of subjective theories in favor of an objective alternative supplies this modification, albeit in denying any cognitive role to the emotions, promoting a firm philosophical foundation to cognition, as the moderator of emotions, through the establishment of Kantian maxims.2 Jean-François Lyotard, as Jacques Derrida recounts in The Work of Mourning (2001), “asked publicly, in full light, and practically, but with reference to mourning, the question of the Enlightenment or the question about the Enlightenment, namely—in that Kantian space he tilled, furrowed, and sowed anew—the question of rational language and of its destination in the public space” (217; emphasis added). Unlike the poststructural understanding of this difficulty—“a destination that is,” according to Derrida, “always elusive in that it is not pre-determined as such” (217)— Richard Wright (in effect) champions a nonideal theory: “a life well lived must include living (and also dying) with dignity” (Shelby 514). Wright’s rationale eschews the necessity of retaliation when faced with injustice. What matters, as Shelby asserts, “is to preserve something invaluable in oneself— a secure sense of one’s moral worth—without which one’s life would be cause for shame or even self-loathing.” For, “in maintaining one’s selfrespect in the face of injustice one is holding onto something that is, in a sense, intangible but that is nevertheless crucial to a worthwhile life” (529). The fundamental essence of human dignity insists on the other-­regarding aspect of that self-respect. This essence must come to the fore under oppression. “When one is a member of an oppressed group,” explains Shelby, “maintaining one’s self-respect is, in part, a duty to others.” The victim of oppression must preserve and respect both the deontological as well as the expectational side of the dignitarian imperative. “Mutual trust is a core component of solidarity. A commitment to not surrender one’s dignity simply to avoid personal loss or harm should therefore be regarded as a necessary condition for full standing in the solidaristic community” (530). Mann’s (Kantian) commitment not only to the other-regarding-­realization, but also to the self-realization, of human dignity in Wright’s “Down by the Riverside” demands and receives the act of self-effacement. The double aspect of this act encompasses the tragedy of Mann’s story: his response to life under oppression, a personal and communal ontological crisis brought to its height by the Old Man in full spate, engages self-­effacing wisdom. Philosophically speaking, that engagement, which results in the ultimate physical forfeiture of Mann’s life, serves a double purpose, helping to

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interrogate prevailing social politics, on the one hand, and to offset the abstractions philosophers commonly apply in designing trolley problems, on the other. Thus, while trolley problems help in analyzing the way literary works question basic ethical views about the interlocking nature of social structures, human interdependencies, and personal choices, literature can improve the credibility of trolley problems by readmitting contextual issues such as race, ethnicity, sex, or sexuality, issues lost during the precipitous abstractions philosophers often undertake when imagining particular scenarios. Wright’s depiction of Mann’s two-ness, which cannot help but evoke the doctrine of the double effect, exemplifies one such improvement. “Down by the Riverside” presents a dignified agent who struggles to remove race from his calculations. While his oblique intention can, his direct cannot abstract in this manner. Only by choosing his own death does Mann finally succeed in this abstraction. In a Kantian realm of ends, “no one would have to choose between one life and [more than one life] simply on the basis of numbers,” insists Wood, “since every life, considered simply as such, would have equal dignity as part of the realm of ends. Thus no one’s life would have to be sacrificed unless their actions excluded its preservation from the harmonious system of ends” (“HEI” 81). Wright’s self-effacing Mann chooses to exclude himself from the unharmonious system of human ends in which he lives. The hope of systemic harmony among all rational ends elicits his self-exclusion, a hope that speaks more of Mann’s self-denying messianism than traditional interpretations of the final scene in “Down by the Riverside” do in tending to conscript or subordinate Christ’s crucifixion. Self-denial can be a charitable act. “Who shows most charity,” asks Foot, “the one who finds it easy to make the good of others his object, or the one who finds it hard?” (“VV” 10). This conundrum is resolvable “only when we stop talking about difficulties standing in the way of virtuous action as if they were of only one kind.” A useful alternative approach distinguishes between difficulties that provide an occasion for virtue and those that reveal a lack of virtue. In the case of an impecunious man who could steal, but does not, his poverty “makes the occasion more tempting, and difficulties of this kind make honest action all the more virtuous” (“VV” 11; emphasis original). Similarly, the racist imperative that heavily influences majoritarian judgments in “Down by the Riverside,” as a minoritarian temptation that conflates the natural desire for self-­ preservation, makes Mann’s actions in rescuing the remaining Heartfields

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all the more virtuous: he knows their identification of him as the postmaster’s killer will probably seal his execution. “Some circumstances, as that great sacrifice is needed, or that the one to be helped is a rival,” as Foot maintains, “give an occasion on which a man’s charity is severely tested.” Under such conditions, “it is the man who acts easily rather than the one who finds it hard who shows the most charity” (“VV” 11). Foot explains that “charity is a virtue of attachment” (“VV” 1), and in “Down by the Riverside,” Mann finds charity difficult because the racist attitude of majoritarians constantly undermines the sympathetic bedrock of humankind, but not he does not find that virtue impossible. Those without sympathy must learn the unreasonableness of their position. The dignitarian imperative supplies this lesson, as it did to Immanuel Kant himself, who initially lacked sympathy for minoritarian groups. Possess sympathy, and if the apportioning within structural situations of a challenging kind is equitable, empathy will follow. As Foot remarks, “some actions are in accordance with virtue without requiring virtue for their performance, whereas others are both in accordance with virtue and such as to show possession of a virtue” (“VV” 13). If Wright’s Mann had steeled himself to murdering the remaining Heartfields, no notion of virtue would have accompanied his doing so, because he would have directed the virtue of courage to a bad end. This reasoning does not suggest, however, that Mann fails to employ courage as a virtue; for, as Foot expounds, “if someone is both wicked and foolhardy,” then courage may operate as a vice (“VV” 17). In “Down by the Riverside,” Mann directs the virtue of courage to a good end, with Wright teaching his readers a lesson, albeit an extremely controversial one, about valor. To answer Nussbaum’s muted hope for consilience between literary theory and ethical theory, there is, then, reason to suppose that prolonged contact with minoritarian writings can usefully modify entrenched conceptions of both rationality and human values, conceptions that currently govern our daily lives through their expression in economic theories and public policies. “I don’t myself believe that war is a special context,” writes Thomas Hurka. “Like others such as Jeff McMahan, I think the morality of war is just an extension of the everyday morality of self- and other-­ defense.” Even if war were a special moral context, adds Hurka, “we’d need a specific argument why one of its effects is to make a Principle of Permissible Harm that’s otherwise applicable no longer so” (140). In this sense, therefore, the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 is not a special moral

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context but an extension of everyday morality, and Wright appreciates and embraces this type of ethical broadening. Proposing Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children, and especially “Down by the Riverside,” as a literary challenge to entrenched conceptions of both rationality and human values, recommends the moral worth of an author who is less recondite, less lubricious, less delicate about, but just as committed to, moral inquiry as Henry James is. Wright proffers what Wood complains most trolley problems do not provide: “The deceptiveness in trolley problems is indirectly related to their cartoonishness,” to repeat his criticism of such thought experiments, “in that it consists at least partly in the fact that we are usually deprived of morally relevant facts that we would often have in real life, and often just as significantly, that we are required to stipulate that we are certain about some matters which in real life could never be certain” (“HEI” 70). “Trolley problem cases do not represent the fundamental issues with which moral principles must deal,” Wood further contends. “On the contrary, these kinds of problems mark the limits of the power of moral thought to deal with problems of human life. The kind of thinking they force on us rather constitutes the way we have to think about things precisely where our moral aspirations have essentially failed” (“HEI” 81). The trolley problems in “Down by the Riverside” do present the fundamental issues with which moral principles must deal. Yoshinobu Hakutani, while writing of racial oppression and concomitant alienation in “Down by the Riverside,” comes to the same conclusion. “On the surface, the story seems to indicate that Brother Mann, his wife, Lulu, and the unborn child all die because of the flood, a natural disaster. But the plot, as structured, ironically suggests that, were Brother Mann treated as one’s brother and as a man, they all would not have died” (232; emphasis added)—and, tellingly, Henry Heartfield would have been among those survivors. “Hopefully, the artistic skills behind the stories collected in Uncle Tom’s Children (1938) will always be appreciated,” declares Russell Carl Brignano. “From the standpoint of language, narration, and theme, they represent Wright the artist at his best” (x). From the standpoint of philosophical literature, moreover, “Down by the Riverside” provides a mediating agency between supporters and detractors of trolley problems. Wright’s first book is, then, an important work of fiction, one that reemphasizes systemic noise, noise that remains, as the recent murder of George Floyd graphically and sickeningly reasserts, at the heart of supposed democracy, noise that pushes thinking to the limits of moral thought, noise that

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remains at the center of communal spaces. In fine, trolley problems necessarily abstract; Wright illustrates the consequences of such abstraction at a communal level; and these consequences necessitate de-abstraction. Trolley problems in philosophy often fall foul of precipitous abstraction; trolley problems in literature can show that that difficulty or failure manifests itself in certain social structures and institutions; these literary scenarios achieve this revelation, in part, by restoring the otherwise abstracted. Imaginative literature of quality, notwithstanding the aporia of semiotic communication, can fill important gaps in the undertakings of moral philosophy. In “Down by the Riverside,” the Manns’ deaths, those of Lulu, Mann, and their stillborn child, represent a phenomenon presumed from the outset of the tale by Henry Heartfield’s premonitory personification of racial hatred: liberty smitten to death. “Kant affirms an idea of independence,” notes Pablo Gilabert. “He often construes it as self-determination, championing agents’ ability to determine themselves to act on the basis of what their own prudential and moral reasoning recommends rather than on the basis of unchecked inclinations.” Self-determination signifies independence. Even Mann’s controversial choice of self-effacement expresses this significance. “Kant is also correct,” adds Gilabert, “to challenge paternalism, and to spot the significant interaction between conditions of economic dependence and lack of active self-determination” (561), and however contentious Mann’s choice, that decision is an active one. Gilabert “is less sure,” however, “that we should accept [Kant’s] tendency to also affirm independence as self-reliance” (561); minoritarians share this uncertainty; they are unlikely to be able, or to be allowed, to embrace this Kantian affirmation; but this inability and this impermissibility do not preclude the minoritarian struggle for self-determination and self-reliance. The shift in Uncle Tom’s Children from the titular and prefigurative Uncle of the book to the Big Boy and then to the Mann of its first two original stories traces a trajectory that resonates with Alain Locke’s previously quoted judgment of African-American social interpretation coming of age with Wright’s volume. Yet, many literary critics value the message of “Long Black Song” above that of “Down by the Riverside.” “For Wright,” argues Laurel J. Gardner, “physical violence was a natural and inevitable way to affirm one’s self and dignity in response to hatred and oppression” (420). To Gardner’s mind, “the stories also show a progression in the extent to which the characters take control of their lives; as they direct the course of their lives they gain dignity” (421). This development

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sees Silas of “Long Black Song” fighting back; he “does not flee,” as Morrison and Mann do, but “avenges his wife’s seduction and dies alone with dignity” (427). From a Kantian perspective, however, a basic sense of Morrison’s personal esteem makes way for Mann’s deeper realization of dignity, a progression that Gardner fails to fully appreciate: Morrison might flee, but Mann most certainly does not. Richard Yarborough also values the message of “Long Black Song” above that of “Down by the Riverside,” accepting the valuation that Wright himself apparently intends with his structural decision to end part one of the expanded edition of Uncle Tom’s Children from 1940 with Silas’s rather than Mann’s travails. “Where Mann’s decision in ‘Riverside’ entails the simple act of running from the white troops who have him in custody, Silas in ‘Long Black Song’ actually engages in armed combat with whites, determined to extract as dear a toll as possible before he is taken.” For Yarborough, “Silas’s militant resistance even in the face of apparently empty options dramatizes Wright’s belief that one must finally impose his or her own meaning on reality.” Fighting back “in the face of death is, to Wright, heroic” (xxvii).3 Denying the emptiness of his options, however, Mann is comparably heroic. In contrast to the perceptive equilibrium personified by Silas, the reflective equilibrium personified by Mann enables and empowers what Gilabert terms a dignitarian approach to communal living, “which holds that we have reason to organize social life in such a way that we respond appropriately to the valuable features of human beings that give rise to their dignity” (554). The norms of this approach prompt the pursuance of what Gilabert calls solidaristic empowerment. According to this precept, “we should support everyone’s autonomous pursuit of a flourishing life by affirming both negative duties not to destroy or block their valuable human capacities and positive duties to protect and enable their development and exercise” (555). This empowerment promises an outer we-ness that should be capable of allaying an inner two-ness. “Being the victims of an unjust system provides the oppressed with a distinctive and life-shaping shared experience,” as Shelby notes. “This common experience often leads them to identify strongly with one another. This special bond, this sense of we-ness, characteristic of all solidarity groups, can lend strength to a morally based commitment to work jointly to achieve social justice” (524). In charting how his philosophical journey mapped his physical wanderings, Margaret Walker allies the Mississippi of Wright’s childhood with folk religion, the Chicago of Wright’s youthful adulthood in the 1930s

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with Marxism, and the Europe of Wright’s mature years with existentialism. “European phenomenological self-determination came with Hegel” (151), writes Paget Henry. “The epistemological orientation of Descartes and Kant returned in Husserlian phenomenology,” which “included the search for an absolute ground for the practice of self-reflection.” Martin Heidegger and Sartre, however, broke with this type of epistemologically centered or transcendental phenomenology. For them, as Wright would have discovered of Sartre, “self-reflection is linked to the ontology of everyday egos,” as Henry explains, this link “thus establishing the European tradition of existential phenomenology” (152). “It is through a Marxist conception of reality and society that the maximum degree of freedom in thought and feeling can be gained for the Negro writer,” insisted Wright in “Blueprint for Negro Writing” (1937). “Further, this dramatic Marxist vision, when consciously grasped, endows the writer with a sense of dignity which no other vision can give” (102). Yet, as David Bakish documents, “Wright left the Communist Party in a widely-publicized break in 1944,” and although he “remained convinced that some adaptation of Marxist economic philosophy could produce a better system than Capitalism” (4), Wright’s other vision tacitly followed the Kantian line of sight which had not only underpinned his formative thoughts but helped withal to orient Marx himself. Wright’s retrospective thoughts concerning Chicago, as his retention of a Marxist conviction despite his break from the Communist Party suggests, became contradictory. Hricko assesses this conflict. On the one hand, “due to the antagonism of the Communist Party and the incessant forms of racism in Chicago, Wright sought to disassociate himself from the city, first by moving away […] and then by repudiating Chicago’s value whenever he had the opportunity to do so” (146). On the other hand, “Wright understood Chicago’s literary value, not only in terms of his own writing, but also in relation to American letters” (147). Faced with political antagonism and relentless racism, a combination of forces that was affecting his equilibrium, both perceptive and reflective, Wright finally chose to leave Chicago for good. In turn, Wright’s excessive self-criticism of Uncle Tom’s Children reveals itself as a blindsiding of the author’s formative Kantianism by his overweening (but relatively short-lived) dedication to Marxism. Initially, Wright moved to “New York, where he spent the decade from 1937 to 1946” (Kinnamon, “The Pastoral Impulse” 42); then he embarked from “New York on 1 May 1946 on the SS Brazil,” (Rowley

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330), destined for Europe. “With the financial success of Black Boy, Wright was able to move with his family to Paris,” reports George Hutchinson, “secure in his profession as no black author preceding him had ever been” (35). In effect, Lewis Lambert Strether and Richard Wright made comparable journeys, though Wright’s awareness of American failings, unlike Strether’s similar awakening, occurred before setting foot on European soil. In France, Strether eventually turns toward continental philosophy, whereas Wright soon turned toward existentialism. “Modernism is a point of contact between analytic philosophy and Continental philosophy,” explains Stephen P.  Schwartz. “Among Continental philosophers, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard can be seen as anticipating or inspiring modernist forms of philosophical activity,” with Heidegger, on the one hand, and “the French existentialists Camus and Sartre,” on the other hand, expressing various aspects of the resulting modernisms (5). “If Henry James does unconsciously pragmatize, it does not necessarily follow that he is a pragmatist,” explains Richard A. Hocks; “nor that, like George Eliot and August Comte, or Melville and Thomas Carlyle, he sets about to use and incorporate certain philosophical doctrines voiced by his brother” (16). In contrast, Wright’s ideological, political, and aesthetical deployment and incorporation of existentialism while in Europe was conscious; he was becoming Sartrean. “I found it urgently necessary to search for a new attitude to replace the set of Marxist assumptions which had in the past more or less guided the direction of my writings,” he stated in 1953. “That uneasy search is still under way” (qtd. in Kent Ruth 206). Part of Wright’s discomfort must have arisen from his loyalty—no matter how unconscious—to Kant’s dignitarian imperative. “Sartre is often taken to be one of Kant’s most vocal critics in the literature, and as rather indebted to other major figures, such as Husserl and Heidegger,” relate Jonathan Head, Anna Tomaszewska, Jochen Bojanowski, and Alberto Vanzo. “As a consequence, often, where comparative analysis has been done upon Kant and Sartre, the emphasis has been on their differences.” Yet, “as recent research has begun to show, the story is not that straightforward and there is much to be explored with regard to parallels between Kant and Sartre” (3). Christina Howells was among the first to undertake this exploration. “Kant is an opponent with whom Sartre has a permanent (albeit oblique) battle in the domain not only of aesthetics but also of ethics and arguably epistemology” (11). That contest was open-ended. “Whilst refusing to acknowledge that a concrete ethics can be derived from general principles,” as Howells traces,

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“Sartre refers to Kant as a forerunner of his notion of freedom as its own end” (31), and the relationship between Sartre’s existentialism and Kantian philosophy, according to Sorin Baiasu’s prescient summary, displays signs of “the anxiety of influence” (21). The anxiety of influence dominates the creative writer and the philosophical author alike; each wishes to be original, but neither is able to throw off, let alone dispense with, the touchstones of antecedent practice. Wright’s uneasiness in turning toward existentialist principles resounded to the same cause. In other words, Wright turned away from Marx, aligned himself with Sartre, but retained his basic allegiance to Kant; and that loyalty to human rationality unsettled him. As an inductee into continental philosophy in The Ambassadors, Strether abandons what Hocks calls “the preconceived moral absolutism of Mrs. Newsome and Woollett in favor of his new and ongoing experience of Europe.” Strether changes “allegiance from what has been presumed and imposed from afar to what he yields from the immediate ‘sea of sense’ in the milieu of Chad and Mme. de Vionnet and of Paris; yet this action develops without Strether’s ever abandoning in the least his moral seriousness by virtue of relocating it contextually instead of a priori” (156). One can read this sense, however, both perceptively and reflectively, as Hocks later intimates: “Paris and the non-narrative moment offer a true abundance, visual, perceptual, and philosophical, next to which hackneyed American ideas of abundance are revealed as stale and monotonous scripts” (515; emphasis added). As Hocks relates, “in his essays and reviews of fellow-realist George Eliot, whose work was greatly influenced by Comte, James repeatedly and admiringly speaks of her mind as ‘philosophic’; but there is nothing to speak of about the philosophy in question.” This nonappearance “appears to repeat itself wherever we turn” in James: “not only is the thought of Kant, [John] Locke, or [G. W. F.] Hegel noticeably absent from his writings, fiction or nonfiction” (68), but also, as Theodora Bosanquet observes, “he could let Huxley and Gladstone, the combatant champions of Darwinian and orthodox theology, enrich the pages of a single letter without any reference to their respective beliefs.” In short, James’s approach to Kant in The Ambassadors appears not through his own words but in the negative guise of Mrs. Newsome, as exposed by Strether, and this exposure reveals what Bosanquet calls the Jamesian pursuit of “the personal impression” (269) or perceptive nuance.

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In explaining the conversion of Mrs. Newsome’s first ambassador, as he does in his “Preface to The Ambassadors” (1907), James avoids naming Kant, yet cannot help but betray the reflective germination of Strether’s conversion. The revolution performed by Strether under the influence of the most interesting of great cities was to have nothing to do with any bêtise of the imputably ‘tempted’ state; he was to be thrown forward, rather, thrown quite with violence, upon his lifelong trick of intense reflexion: which friendly test indeed was to bring him out, through winding passages, through alternations of darkness and light, very much in Paris, but with the surrounding scene itself a minor matter, a mere symbol for more things than had been dreamt of in the philosophy of Woollett. (316; emphasis added)

Strether’s intense reflection, as a circuitous mental journey, followed the promising route of continental philosophy, as figured by the streets of Paris. This track promises a new outlook that resists the concomitant reductionism of Strether’s former mindset. Parfit notes how reductionism “raises notoriously difficult questions” (515n11); space precludes an examination of these questions here; and reference to Reasons and Persons—in which Parfit argues that personal identity is not what matters; “what matters is Relation R,” which he defines as “psychological connectedness and/or continuity” (215; emphasis original), where “psychological connectedness is the holding of particular direct psychological connections,” and “psychological continuity is the holding of overlapping chains of strong connectedness” (206; emphasis original)—is recommended. One quotation from Parfit’s first monograph must herein suffice in addressing the topic of reductionism. “After Hume thought hard about his arguments, he was thrown into ‘the most deplorable condition imaginable, environed with the deepest darkness.’ The cure was to dine and play backgammon with his friends. Hume’s arguments supported total scepticism. This is why they brought darkness and utter loneliness.” Reductionism had “the opposite effect” on Parfit: “thinking hard about these arguments removes the glass wall between me and others” (282). Merle A.  Williams even suggests that Strether gains “a new type of respect for Woollett in general, and for Mrs Newsome in particular.” Strether’s analogies between Mrs. Newsome’s rational morality and fixed particularity become “infused with an ironic respect.” Strether’s “self-­ doubt has been diffused, and he is sufficiently confident in his own method of judging to recognize the possible strengths of the New England code.”

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As Williams observes, Strether “has rediscovered his heritage by ‘unthinking’ it, and then stepping back to examine it without the emotional charge of a reluctant personal involvement” (75; emphasis added). According to Williams’s interpretation, therefore, Strether has attained reflective equilibrium in putting aside his perceptions. Nussbaum’s interpretation of James’s interpretation of Kant is correct; Nussbaum agrees with James’s reading; James’s interpretation is flawed; but Strether appears to correct his creator’s error. To finesse her argument, Williams turns to existentialist philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61) on perception, referring especially to “The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences” (1947) and “Eye and Mind” (1964). Such deference is appropriate to a discussion of Wright’s philosophical literature because Wright was personally acquainted with Merleau-Ponty.4 In addressing nineteenth-century phenomenology, “the finer distinctions which Merleau-Ponty develops are most valuable,” avers Williams, “and he shows a penetrating understanding of the way in which each person is rooted in an environment, shaping it creatively, while unavoidably shaped by it.” Williams emphasizes how Merleau-Ponty “recognizes that philosophies of reflection have to begin at some point, and credits an idealist thinker such as Kant with an implicit acknowledgement of his presuppositions” (171). In “The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences,” Merleau-Ponty writes: The world itself, which (to give a first, rough definition) is the totality of perceptible things and the thing of all things, must be understood not as an object in the sense the mathematician or the physicist give to this word— that is, a kind of unified law which would cover all the partial phenomena or as a fundamental relation verifiable in all—but as the universal style of all possible perceptions. We must make this notion of the world, which guides the whole transcendental deduction of Kant, though Kant does not tell us its provenance, more explicit. “If a world is to be possible,” he says sometimes, as if he were thinking before the origin of the world, as if he were assisting at its genesis and could pose its a priori conditions. In fact, as Kant himself said profoundly, we can only think the world because we have already experienced it; it is through this experience that we have the idea of being, and it is through this experience that the words “rational” and “real” receive a meaning simultaneously. (16–17)

Nonetheless, as Williams remarks, Merleau-Ponty “objects that such philosophies of reflection destroy the distinction between the originating

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and the derived.” Merleau-Ponty’s alternative is a radical reflection that “would dispense with elaborate theoretical strategies, and seek to explore the full range of sensory and social activity which operates at a pre-­ theoretical level.” Merleau-Ponty’s approach combines two stages: first, reflection on the phenomenal field provided by immediate perception; second, reflection on the conditions necessary for the first stage of reflection. For Williams, this radical method is, in effect, “the function which James assigns to Lambert Strether throughout his protracted enquiry in The Ambassadors.” Strether’s “compassionate involvement is as vital an aspect of the process of innovative cultural appraisal as his shrewdly exercised detachment” (171). This interpretation of Strether approximates to a diachronic combination of the equilibria respectively sought by Martha C. Nussbaum and John Rawls. The term “perceptive reflection” hereby offers more definitional accuracy than the term “radical reflection” does, with this combination involving, therefore, a fair degree of what Parfit would decry as foundational sand (OWM 1:91). Wright stepped onto unstable philosophical foundations too: those of existentialism. “I intend,” as he asserted in 1951 in the opening paragraph of “I Choose Exile,” “to remain in exile” (1). That step and that exile stimulated adventures and challenges that increasingly placed politics before art. “From Paris,” as William E. Dow documents, Wright “helped Sartre and Camus launch the Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire (RDR), an association devoted to promoting international democratic values. Wright founded the Franco-American Fellowship, which battled the racist policies of American companies and institutions in France, including the American Hospital in Paris, and protested against injustices directed against African Americans.” Members of the fellowship “included Baldwin, Leroy Haines, Ollie Stewart, Sartre, Claude Bourdet, and Charles Delaunay” (45). To appropriate Rawls’s terminology, Wright’s reflective equilibrium established, to appropriate Nussbaum’s terminology, Wright’s perspective equilibrium: one reason he felt at home France, in a way he could not feel in America, was a matter of reflection. “My first week in Paris taught me that the fight I had made back home for Negro rights was right, but somehow futile.” He was already feeling the influence of French humanity. “The deep contrast between French and American racial attitudes demonstrated that it was barbarousness that incited such militant racism in white Americans” (“ICE” 7). He discussed the matter with André Gide. “The more uncivilized a white man, the more he fears and hates all those people

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who differ from him,” Gide told Wright. “With us in France, the different, the variant is prized; our curiosity to know other people is the hallmark of our civilized state. In America it is precisely the variant, the different who is hounded down by mobs and killed. The American is a terribly socially insecure man who feels threatened by the mere existence of men different from himself” (qtd. in “ICE” 7). While resident “in the United States,” as Alan M. Wald relates in “He Tried to Be a Communist: Wright and the Black Literary Left” (2021), “Wright had to navigate the fury of CP-USA leaders on the one hand, and the growing domestic anti-communist witch hunt on the other” (90).5 Once in Europe, Wright was eager to unearth the secret to French impartiality and soon equated that point of view with a respect for the cultural and historical achievements of France. “What restrained a Frenchman from humiliating a Negro was not sentimental idealism,” discovered Wright, “but a deep reverence for French dignity and worth” (“ICE” 7). “By calling on humanity, on the belief in dignity, on love, on charity,” states Franz Fanon in Black Skins, White Masks, “it would be easy to prove, or to win the admission, that the black is the equal of the white” (30), but throughout his life and throughout his oeuvre, Wright shows that making such a call is not so easy, its successful invocation not so sure of winning that admission.6 Fanon’s “purpose is quite different,” however, from providing such proofs. “What I want to do is help the black man to free himself of the arsenal of complexes that has been developed by the colonial environment” (BSWM 30). Of his own seeming enlightenment and that of newborn postcolonialists, Fanon continues: By referring everything to the idea of the dignity of man, one had ripped prejudice to shreds. After much reluctance, the scientists had conceded that the Negro was a human being; in vivo and in vitro the Negro had been proved analogous to the white man: the same morphology, the same ­histology. Reason was confident of victory on every level. I put all the parts back together. But I had to change my tune. That victory played cat and mouse; it made a fool of me. As the other put it, when I was present, it was not; when it was there, I was no longer. In the abstract there was agreement: The Negro is a human being. That is to say, amended the less firmly convinced, that like us he has his heart on the left side. But on certain points the white man remained intractable. (BSWM 119–20)

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As mediated by Fanon, the other’s reference to “heart” cannot but betray Fanon’s own preference for perception over naively confident “reason”; and when praising the fight for freedom, Fanon invokes “the dignity of the spirit” rather than the dignitarian imperative of Kant.7 Indeed, when Fanon does partake of Western philosophy in Black Skins, White Masks, that philosophy is more Hegelian than Kantian. “In its immediacy, consciousness of self is simple being-for-itself,” he avers. “In order to win the certainty of oneself, the incorporation of the concept of recognition is essential.” Equally, “the other is waiting for recognition by us, in order to burgeon into the universal consciousness of self. Each consciousness of self is in quest of absoluteness. It wants to be recognized as a primal value without reference to life, as a transformation of subjective certainty (Gewissheit) into objective truth (Wahrheit)” (BSWM 217–18). When consciousness of self “encounters resistance from the other, self-­ consciousness undergoes the experience of desire—the first milestone on the road that leads to the dignity of the spirit” (BSWM 218; emphasis original). As cited by Fanon, “it is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained,” according to Hegel in The Phenomenology of Mind (1807); “only thus is it tried and proved that the essential nature of self-consciousness is not bare existence, is not the merely immediate form in which it at first makes its appearance, is not its mere absorption in the expanse of life” (233; emphasis original). For Fanon, the resistance emanating from others means that self-consciousness “can be achieved only through conflict and through the risk that conflict implies” (BSWM 218). Desire demands (Sidgwickian) tokens of respect. Desire demands recognition from alterity. “Every time a man has contributed to the victory of the dignity of the spirit, every time a man has said no to an attempt to subjugate his fellows, I have felt solidarity with his act” (BSWM 226), but unlike some who work peaceably for civil rights, Fanon does “not carry innocence to the point of believing that appeals to reason or to respect for human dignity can alter reality.” No, “there is only one solution: to fight” (BSWM 224). The emphasis on dignity in Fanon’s later writings, however, appears to be less Hegelian and more Kantian. “There is no use in wasting time repeating that hunger with dignity is preferable to bread eaten in slavery,” he rails in The Wretched of the Earth. “On the contrary, we must become convinced that colonialism is incapable of procuring for the colonized peoples the material conditions which might make them forget their concern for dignity. Once colonialism has realized where its tactics of social

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reform are leading, we see it falling back on its old reflexes, reinforcing police effectives, bringing up troops, and setting a reign of terror which is better adapted to its interests and its psychology” (WE 208). Majoritarian reflexes, casting minoritarian desire for recognition as a warning or a threat, summon repressive state apparatuses to enforce ideological state apparatuses. “The masses should know that the government and the party are at their service,” insists Fanon. “A deserving people, in other words a people conscious of its dignity, is a people that never forgets these facts. During the colonial occupation the people were told that they must give their lives so that dignity might triumph. But the African peoples quickly came to understand that it was not only the occupying power that threatened their dignity.” They soon “realized that dignity and sovereignty were exact equivalents, and in fact, a free people living in dignity is a sovereign people” (WE 198). A “national government,” maintains Fanon, “ought to govern by the people and for the people, for the outcasts and by the outcasts.” No president, “can substitute himself for the popular will; and the national government, before concerning itself about international prestige, ought first to give back their dignity to all citizens, fill their minds and feast their eyes with human things, and create a prospect that is human because conscious and sovereign men dwell therein” (WE 205; emphasis added). Of necessity, dignity and consciousness, as the construction of Fanon’s sentences indicates, prefigure sovereignty. “During the first congress of the African Cultural Society which was held in Paris in 1956,” reports Fanon of a conference at which Wright also participated, “the American Negroes of their own accord considered their problems from the same standpoint as those of their African brothers” (WE 215). Wright’s contribution included “Tradition and Industrialization: The Plight of the Tragic Elite in Africa,” in which he concedes that his call for African-American nationalism, first made during the 1930s, was no longer fully justified. “Since that time,” explains Wright, our claims to humanity have found a great deal of implementation in American law backed by police and military action. I hope, and this is all that I can say about this matter at present, that that implementation in law and that police and military action on our behalf will continue. I would like to explain that the Black Nationalism that we, American Negroes, practised in America, and which we were forced to practise, was a reluctant nationalism,

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a proud and defensive one. If these implementations of American law continue, and, as they continue, that nationalism of itself will be liquidated. (347)8

Although Wright had turned away from the secularity of Marxism, “the content of my Westernness resides fundamentally,” he continued to believe, “in my secular outlook upon life” (“TI” 350). Erudition had, and continued, to inform this outlook. “Reading of history brought me abreast of a strong current of opposition to that Church”—Roman Catholicism— “that had condemned all colored mankind.” Hence, “when I discovered that John Calvin and Martin Luther were stalwart rebels against the domination of a Church that had condemned and damned the majority of the human race, I felt that the impulses animating them were moving in the direction of a fuller concept of human dignity and freedom” (“TI” 352). Notwithstanding that feeling, “the Protestantism of Calvin and Luther did not go far enough; they underestimated the nature of the revolution they were trying to make” (“TI” 352; emphasis added). Put succinctly, “I feel that man—just sheer brute man just as he is—has a meaning and value over and above all sanctions or mandates from mystical powers either on high or from below. I am convinced that the humble, fragile dignity of man, buttressed by a tough-souled pragmatism, implemented by methods of trial and error, can sustain and nourish human life, can endow it with sufficient meaning.” Of necessity, whatever his feeling and whatever his talk of pragmatism and his allusions to induction, the supreme value or worth of dignity, as the construction of Wright’s estimation indicates, prefigures that sufficiency. “These are my assumptions, my values, my morality, if you insist upon that word” (“TI” 350; emphasis original). Fanon was unconvinced. “Cultured Africans, speaking of African civilization, decreed that there should be a reasonable status within the state for those who had formerly been slaves. But little by little the American Negroes realized that the essential problems confronting them were not the same as those that confronted the African Negroes.” Fanon tacitly cast Wright as one such culprit. “The Negroes of Chicago only resemble the Nigerians or the Tanganyikans in so far as they were all defined in relation to the whites. But once the first comparisons had been made and subjective feelings were assuaged, the American Negroes realized that the objective problems were fundamentally heterogeneous” (WE 215–16). African and African-American cultures became “different entities because the men who wished to incarnate” them “realized that every culture is first and

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foremost national, and that the problems which kept Richard Wright or Langston Hughes on the alert were fundamentally different from those which might confront Leopold Senghor or Jomo Kenyatta” (WE 216). Despite sharing the deep French reverence for dignity and worth, the unreasonableness of others, especially in political spheres, continued to dog Wright’s peace of mind. “After 1946–47, in Europe, Africa, and the Far East,” as Wald traces, “he engaged with the contentious politics of anti-colonialism, Pan-Africanism, non-alignment, and much more.” Often,  “he found himself balanced on a knife-edge between escalating, nerve-wracking positions, and by his last years, he had separated from most of the organizations he supported, joined, or even founded—the Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire, the Franco-American Fellowship, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and so forth.” Wright’s uneasiness of mind would even undermine his own reasonableness. “One excruciating dilemma,” as Wald details, “would be his need to stay silent about the French treatment of Algerians to maintain a residency in France; another was the necessity of signing anti-Communist affidavits (and perhaps informing) to renew his US passport” (“HTBC” 90). “Dante mourned and raged for Florence, James Joyce always carried Dublin with him and cherished it and kept its streets alive in his mind with gossip. But what of Henry James,” asks Francis MacManus, “the American expatriate, the novelists’ novelist, who ended his life as an English gentleman more English than the English themselves?” (101), and what of Richard Wright, who ended his life as an exile, rather than as an expatriate? The duress under which James suffered was more artistic than sociopolitical. The duress under which Wright suffered was more sociopolitical than artistic. Each man’s rational response to the pressure he had endured in America was to relocate to Europe. In effect, the choice for each author fell between killing his art or letting the American within him slowly die— an unenviable trolley problem, but a lifeboat that neither man was willing to scupper, a trolley problem that neither man could avoid, prorogate, or reject. American novelist and essayist Hamlin Garland visited James at Lamb House in 1906. “He became very much in earnest at last and said something which surprised and gratified me,” reports Garland. “It was an admission I had not expected him to make. ‘If I were to live my life over again,’ he said in a low voice, and fixing upon me a somber glance, ‘I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land. I would study its beautiful side. The mixture of Europe and

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America which you see in me has proved disastrous.’” Negative capability was beyond James’s grasp. “It has made of me a man who is neither American nor European. I have lost touch with my own people, and I live here alone” (461)—and alone he died there too—hinc illae lacrimae. “His point of view, his centre, his imaginative eye,” as MacManus writes of James, “became English, while America so faded on his horizon that when he visited his native land in 1904 for the first time in twenty years, he was more like a pilgrim than a returning expatriate” (102). James seemed to pass, even if he did not venture to do so, for being English. On the one hand, “English critics accept[ed] him as he wished to be accepted, that is, as a figure of English literature” (101). On the other hand, “American critics either accept him at the English valuation and are bored by him, or dismiss him as an American who got lost on a trip to Europe” (102). Exiled in Paris, as was long-term compatriot James Baldwin, Wright neither seemed nor ventured to pass for being French—“I do not presume to claim,” Wright told Michel Gordey on 10 January 1947, eight months after landing on French soil, “an overall judgment on French culture”— but he did venture to say that the influence of that culture “on an American writer, especially a black American writer who has just left the ‘confined’ atmosphere of the United States, [was] absolutely prodigious” (118). Unlike James in England, Wright was not alone in France: he had his wife Ellen, he had their children too; “indeed, the Wright family,” as Gordey presumed to claim, “is on its way to becoming ‘naturalized’ Parisian” (122; emphasis original). That assimilation never materialized. “Wright’s situation remained as full of paradoxes and contradictions as it ever had been,” observes James Campbell. “Having left the United States to avoid persecution, he looked behind him on a Paris street and could swear he saw the shadow of that persecution taking cover in a doorway.” France had “handed him one variety of freedom, while depriving him of another.” What was worse, “it was beginning to seem as if he had left his story,” the narrative of dignified struggle, “at home.” Wright had desired dignity, sought freedom, “but if he believed the critics, if he read between the lines of the letters from his agent, if he perceived a gleam of truth in the attacks made on him by the younger generation, he could see that as a writer he was becoming free of a subject” (101). That loss accompanied the undignified attacks on his freedom that persisted until his death. “Richard Wright mysteriously died in a French hospital after being admitted for an ongoing mild stomach ailment,” relates John L. Potash.

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“Doctors had just given Wright an otherwise clean bill of health.” Potash recalls how African-American cartoonist “Ollie Harrington said Wright had forewarned him of French and U.S. intelligence carrying out his murder during such a hospital stay and had developed procedures to protect himself.” According to Harrington, “this was the first time Wright strayed from those procedures. Authorities said Wright died of a heart attack and, despite family suspicions of murder, no autopsy was done” (58). William L. Andrews and Douglas Taylor effectively concur with Potash: The mysterious circumstances of his death—Wright had been recovering from amoebic dysentery, for which he was being treated at the Gibez clinic; he had no history of heart disease; he died shortly after receiving an injection; and his body was immediately cremated without his family’s permission—combined with the fact that he had been the subject of FBI surveillance and harassment since 1942, led many to believe that he may have been the victim of foul play. (10–11)

By the time of his death, and despite the inurnment of his ashes at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, Wright had tempered his optimism toward the French “sea of sense,” as his unpublished manuscript Island of Hallucination intimates. “He had to admit,” relates the heterodiegetic narrator of the character Fishbelly, “that he was not truly in or of France; he knew that he could never be French even if he lived in France a million years. He loved France and the French, yet France was always psychologically distant in his mind. Had he come too late?” (qtd. in Hazel Rowley 481–82). Notwithstanding his waning confidence, Wright’s reasoned mood never plummeted to the depths of either James’s sense of disaster or Fanon’s considered unease. With the end of slavery on French soil, “the black man contented himself with thanking the white man,” laments Fanon, “and the most forceful proof of the fact is the impressive number of statues erected all over France and the colonies to show white France stroking the kinky hair of this nice Negro whose chains had just been broken” (WE 220).9 Wright’s “exile afforded some relief from racism,” observes Addison Gayle, “but his fierce sense of independence and his well-earned reputation intensified the conflict between himself and agencies of the American Government, which sought to force him to mitigate his attacks upon American domestic and foreign policy and to inform on old comrades and friends in the Communist Party.” This part  of the government’s strategy “began even before he went into exile, and one of the reasons for his so doing was to escape the pressure brought upon him to be an

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informant” (x). Whereas Mann’s defiant self-effacement in “Down by the Riverside” does not alter the American system, Wright’s defiant self-­ actualization, one that motivated his life and resulted in his own self-­ effacement, ensured the cultural importance of his authorial legacy. “In France, on a passport granted by the State Department, which had the power to rescind it at any moment, he underwent an ordeal as severe as that he had previously recorded in Black Boy,” believes Gayle. “It may well have been the strain and stress attending this ordeal which brought about his sudden death” (x–xi). As Wright acknowledges of his friendship with Sartre, “I was made to understand that a French writer considers it a vital part of his growth as an artist and a human being to shed infantile prejudices,” to slough first-­ order intolerance. “Albert Camus, Jean Cocteau, Simone de Beauvoir and a host of other French writers share the same passion to defend the dignity of man” (“ICE” 8). Little wonder that Richard Wright, as a defender of dignity from the outset of his authorial career, remained loyal not only to his self-determined exile but also to his rational passion to defend this (Kantian) attribute of unsurpassable worth. “France is, above all, a land of refuge” (“ICE” 10), he avows. Even when there is [a] shortage of food, Frenchmen will share their crusts of bread with strangers. Yet, nowhere do you see so much gaiety as in Paris, nowhere can you hear so much spirited talk. Each contemporary event is tasted, chewed, digested. There is no first-rate French novelist specializing in creating unreal, romantic historical novels! The present is to be understood and they find it exciting enough. (“ICE” 10–11)

Wright’s philosophical literature deals with that ever-presence. “‘The problems of philosophy,’ says Jean-Paul Sartre,” as Wright quotes his confrère, “‘are to be found in the streets.’” Hinc lucem et pocula sacra. Those philosophical thoroughfares include the dilemmas of Mann, the difficulties of interhuman coordination, the tracks and the lifeboats of fundamental trolley problems. “I have encountered among the French no social snobbery,” reports Wright. “The more individualistic a man is, the more acceptable he is. The spirit of the mob, whether intellectual, racial, or moral, is the very opposite of the spirit of French life,” he concludes. “SOIT RAISONNABLE, (be reasonable) is their motto” (“ICE” 11; emphasis original). Yes, however difficult and protracted our dilemmas prove to be, let us concur with Wright: let us, above all, be reasonable.

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Notes 1. The concept of religious martyrdom is itself equivocal. From a sociohistorical perspective, as Andrew Greenland, Damon Proulx, and David A. Savage relate, “the early Christian martyrs faced death in a manner that is (probably) best interpreted as voluntary, deliberate, non-violent and rational” (107). The prospect of an infinite payoff in the afterlife—a sort of transcendental utility—made self-immolation seductive. In a related argument, several social scientists “have attributed the ability of early Christians to endure as rooted in masochism,” notes Rodney Stark in citing (among others) Karl A. Menninger. “That is, we are expected to believe that the martyrs defied their accusers because they loved pain and probably gained sexual pleasure from it” (165; emphasis original). As Man Against Himself (1938) testifies, however, Menninger does not support that argument: “much psychoanalytic literature, particularly the earlier literature, proceeds upon the assumption that masochism is the chief characteristic of martyrdom, a supposition which newer discoveries in unconscious motivation do not support” (91). 2. A Kantian maxim amounts to what Guy Elgat calls “a practical rule of thumb” (146). 3. As with “Down by the Riverside,” Wright drew on his own experiences in fashioning not only “Long Black Song,” but also Silas, who figures Silas Hoskins, Wright’s uncle. “Wright’s earliest and closest encounter with the danger of white people came in Arkansas when his Uncle Hoskins,” as Howard documents, “was shot and killed by a white man” (55). As Addison Gayle reports, Wright’s mother had decided to move to “Elaine, Arkansas, where her sister, Margaret, and her husband, Silas Hoskins, lived.” Ever thoughtful, “after some hesitation, [Richard] decided to go with his mother” (14). In Elaine, according to Wright’s recollections from Black Boy, “Aunt Maggie’s husband, Uncle Hoskins, owned a saloon that catered to the hundreds of Negroes who worked in the surrounding sawmills” (44). Early one morning, Wright “awakened to learn that Uncle Hoskins had not come home from the saloon. Aunt Maggie fretted and worried. She wanted to visit the saloon and find out what had happened, but Uncle Hoskins had forbidden her to come to the place” (46). Like Mann before his family embarkation, the capitalist imperative had seemingly colored Hoskins’s reason d’être and that inculcation proved fatal. “I learned afterwards that Uncle Hoskins had been killed by whites who had long coveted his flourishing liquor business,” recounts Wright. “He had been threatened with death and warned many times to leave, but he had wanted to hold on a while longer to amass more money” (48). 4. While Wright knew “Sartre, Camus, and Gide,” as Michel Fabre notes, “he was acquainted with few other French existentialists.” This small band

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included Merleau-Ponty, whom Wright “talked with […] a few times,” though “ha[ving] none of his books in his library,” and Gabriel Marcel, with whose works “he was more conversant” ([1978] 48). 5. “He Tried to Be a Communist” is cited parenthetically hereafter as “HTBC.” 6. Black Skins, White Masks is cited parenthetically hereafter as BSWM. 7. Ghanaian political theorist and revolutionary politician Kwame Nkrumah was of Fanon’s persuasion in at once preferring perception over reflection yet underscoring that preference with respect for dignity. “The traditional face of Africa includes an attitude toward man which can only be described, in its social manifestation, as being socialist,” writes Nkrumah. “This arises from the fact that man is regarded in Africa as primarily a spiritual being, a being endowed originally with certain inward dignity, integrity and value” (68). 8. “Tradition and Industrialization: The Plight of the Tragic Elite in Africa” is cited parenthetically hereafter as “TI.” 9. Multitudes of these statues, which were in prominent positions across France at the time François Maspero was publishing Fanon’s Les damnés de la terre, within a year of Wright’s death, were still in place sixty years later, when Françoise Vergès made her vociferous demand for Memorial Justice.

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© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Wainwright, Kantian Dignity and Trolley Problems in the Literature of Richard Wright, American Literature Readings in the 21st Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40216-6

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Index1

A Allison, Dorothy, 115–117, 119, 134, 140, 152 trolley problems (opinion of), 117, 134 works; “Mean Stories and Stubborn Girls,” 115; “What It Means to Be Free,” 115 Althusser, Louis, 143n15 ideological state apparatus (ISA) (definition of), 143n15 repressive state apparatus (RSA) (definition of), 143n15 Analytic philosophy, 2, 3, 5, 11n1, 140–141, 187 Anscombe, G. E. M., 3 works; “Modern Moral Philosophy,” 3 Aquinas, Thomas, 5, 20, 176 Aristotle, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 20, 23, 24, 40, 97, 176, 179 Augustine, 20

B Baldwin, James, 36, 43–45, 47, 62, 63, 66, 84, 132, 160, 191, 197 works; “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” 62, 81n11; “Many Thousands Gone,” 43, 62 Bentham, Jeremy, 101 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 85 Brown, Sterling A., 68, 80n9, 85 Burrow, Trigant, 58, 59, 157, 168 works; The Social Basis of Consciousness: A Study in Organic Psychology Based upon a Synthetic and Societal Concept of the Neuroses, 58 C Clinton, William J., 98, 125 Cowley, Malcolm, 60 Cullen, Countee, 80n9, 85

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Wainwright, Kantian Dignity and Trolley Problems in the Literature of Richard Wright, American Literature Readings in the 21st Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40216-6

221

222 

INDEX

D Deleuze, Gilles, 48n7, 49n7 major literature (definition of), 48n7 minor literature (definition of), 48n7 Descartes, René, 20, 50n15, 186 Diamond, Cora, 3, 14n10, 14n11 works; “Martha Nussbaum and the Need for Novels,” 14n10, 14n11; “Missing the Adventure: Reply to Martha Nussbaum,” 14n10 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 86, 87, 134, 136, 137, 153 Wright, Richard (influence on), 134 works; Notes from Underground, 134, 136, 153 Douglass, Frederick, 128, 173 works; “The Color Line,” 128; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, 173 Dreiser, Theodore, 34, 35, 49n10, 86, 126 works; An American Tragedy, 126 Du Bois, W. E. B., 127–132 double consciousness (definition of), 128, 130, 131 works; Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept, 129; The Souls of Black Folk, 128, 142n10; “Strivings of the Negro People,” 128 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 85 Dworkin, Ronald, 168 E Eliot, T. S., 42, 85, 89, 127 works; “The Dry Salvages,” 89, 127 Ellison, Ralph, 47, 137, 139, 140

works; Invisible Man, 47, 137; “Recent Negro Fiction,” 139 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 18, 19 transcendentalism, 19 Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi, 81n13 Eze, Michael Onyebuchi, 71 F Fanon, Frantz, 55, 80n4, 117, 127, 132, 142n6, 192–195, 198, 201n7, 201n9 African Cultural Society (Paris Congress of 1956), 194 works; Black Skin, White Masks, 117, 127, 142n6, 192, 193; The Wretched of the Earth, 55, 80n4, 193 Faulkner, William, 60, 61, 85, 120, 121, 123 works; “Address upon Receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature,” 123; If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, 120–123, 142n8; “Interview with Russell Howe,” 61 Foot, Philippa, 1, 3, 5, 8, 24, 100–106, 108, 110n9, 140, 146–148, 150, 156, 157, 175, 176, 181, 182 abortion (consideration of), 100, 147 charity (consideration of), 103, 156, 181, 182 trolley problems (consideration of), 104, 105, 108, 147 virtues and vices (consideration of), 5, 8, 24, 140, 156 works; Natural Goodness, 103, 110n9; “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect,” 100, 105; “Virtues and Vices,” 5, 8, 24, 140, 156

 INDEX 

Forster, E. M., 25, 26, 28 James, Henry (consideration of), 25 Freud, Sigmund, 56–58, 147 works; “‘A Child is Being Beaten.’ A Contribution to the Study of the Origin of Sexual Perversion,” 56; The Interpretation of Dreams, 147 G Game theory definition, 96, 97 minimax theorem (definition of), 110n6 nonzero-sum dilemma (definition of), 98, 110n6 Pareto optimum (definition of), 99 Stag Hunt (definition of), 98 Garland, Hamlin, 196 James, Henry, 196 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 42, 77 Gilroy, Paul, 131, 132 Gordon, Lewis, 132 works; The Quiet American, 152 Guattari, Félix, 48n7, 49n7 H Harris, Walter, 132 Hayden, Robert, 85 Hedge, Frederic Henry, 19, 20, 29 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 19 Kant, Immanuel, 19, 29 Locke, John, 19 transcendentalism, 19 Hegel, G. W. F., 42, 44, 186, 188, 193 Hersey, John, 126, 156, 157 works; A Single Pebble, 126, 156 Hughes, Langston, 85, 196 Hurka, Thomas, 106, 182

223

Hurston, Zora Neale, 62, 77, 82n18, 159, 160, 164, 176 Uncle Tom’s Children (reviews), 77 Wright, Richard (criticism of), 159 I Ideological state apparatus (ISA) (definition of), 143n15 J James, Henry, 7, 14n10, 17, 18, 21–29, 31–34, 38, 54, 63, 65, 67, 68, 70, 75, 84–87, 92, 117, 118, 127, 138, 146, 168, 170, 171, 176, 179, 183, 187–191, 196–198 James, Sr., Henry (father), 18, 20, 21, 36 James, William (brother), 3, 17, 18, 21, 26, 130, 142n11 Lamb House (Rye, Kent, England), 38 Newport, Rhode Island, 18, 33 New York City, 33 works; The Ambassadors, 17, 21, 22, 24, 27, 29, 32, 38, 54, 63, 65, 67, 70, 75, 85–87, 92, 127, 139, 146, 179, 188, 191; The Golden Bowl, 7, 14n10, 26, 38, 139; The Portrait of a Lady, 18, 20, 21, 25, 86; “Preface to The Ambassadors,” 189; “Preface to The Lesson of the Master,” 28, 29; The Princess Casamassima. A Novel, 22; A Small Boy and Others, 18; The Wings of the Dove, 25, 86, 139 Wright, Richard (influence on), 86 James, Sr., Henry, 18, 20, 21, 36

224 

INDEX

James, William, 3, 17, 18, 26, 130, 142n11 works; “To Henry James” (22 October 1905), 27, 32, 67; The Principles of Psychology, 130 John, Eileen, 3, 6 Johnson, James Weldon, 85, 130–132 works; The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, 130 K Kagan, Shelly, 92, 93, 105, 106, 112, 120 Kamm, F. M., 92, 105, 120, 161 works; “How Was the Trolley Turned?,” 120; “Who Turned the Trolley?,” 161 Kant, Immanuel, 1, 3, 5, 7, 19–22, 29, 32, 39–47, 48n2, 50n15, 53, 54, 65, 67, 69–72, 76, 79–80n3, 81n13, 81n17, 86, 87, 103, 110n5, 110n9, 111, 112, 117, 118, 124, 137, 142n1, 165, 167, 168, 176, 177, 182, 184, 186–190, 193 categorical imperative (definition of), 40, 41, 43, 79–80n3, 110n5 dignitarian imperative (definition of), 54, 65, 70, 103, 117, 167, 182, 187, 193 Formula of Humanity as End in Itself (FH) (definition of), 72, 177 Formula of Universal Law (definition of), 112 Marx, Karl (influence on), 44 racism, 42 works; Critique of Judgment, 71, 72; Critique of Practical Reason, 40, 42; Groundwork of the

Metaphysics of Morals, 42, 71, 72; Lectures on Physical Geography, 42; The Metaphysics of Morals, 46 L Levinas, Emmanuel, 31 works; Otherwise than Being, Or, Beyond Essence, 33 Locke, Alain, 59, 60, 62, 184 works; “The Negro: ‘New’ or Newer: A Retrospective Review of the Literature of the Negro for 1938,” 59 Locke, John, 19, 50n15 Lyotard, Jean-François, 31, 180 M Major literature (definition of), 32, 48n7 Mann, Thomas, 84–88, 92, 93, 120, 127, 145–150, 152–168, 171–182, 174n3, 184, 185, 199, 200n3 Wright, Richard (influence on), 87, 120, 127, 145, 147, 156, 165, 166, 176, 181, 182 Marx, Karl, 40, 44–47, 53, 54, 60, 143n15, 186, 188 alienation (definition of), 45, 60 Kant, Immanuel (influence of), 40, 44, 46, 47, 54, 188 works; Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, 79n2 McKay, Claude, 55, 85 Mencken, H. L., 33–35, 38, 49n10, 61, 74, 85, 167, 178 works; “The Burden of Credulity,” 167; “The Curse of Prejudice,”

 INDEX 

61; “The Leading American Novelist,” 34; “Notes in the Margin,” 34; “Puritanism as a Literary Force,” 35 Wright, Richard (influence on), 167, 178 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 190, 191, 201n4 Wright, Richard (influence on), 201n4 Midgely, Mary, 105, 108 Minor literature (definition of), 33, 48n7, 69, 109, 117, 119 Murdoch, Iris, 7, 12n2, 24, 25 works; “Literature and Philosophy: A Conversation with Bryan Magee,” 7 N Nash, John, 99 Nash equilibrium (definition of), 99, 100 Nelson, Marilyn, 85 works; “Owning the Masters,” 85 Nkrumah, Kwame, 201n7 Nussbaum, Martha C., 1–11, 17, 21–25, 27–33, 46, 54, 58, 65, 67–71, 88, 93–97, 105, 112, 117, 118, 120, 122, 126, 142n3, 153, 157, 176, 179, 182, 190, 191 James, Henry (consideration of), 7, 17, 29, 31, 32, 65, 67, 70, 117, 118, 190 perceptive equilibrium (definition of), 4, 11, 17, 21, 23, 25, 27–30, 54, 67–69, 77, 93, 94, 117, 120, 122, 142n3 Rawls, John (contemplation of), 8–11, 24, 157, 191

225

works; “The Discernment of Perception: An Aristotelian Conception of Private and Public Rationality,” 10; “Flawed Crystals: James’s The Golden Bowl and Literature as Moral Philosophy,” 7, 153; “Introduction: Form and Content, Philosophy and Literature,” 17; “Literature and Ethical Theory: Allies or Adversaries?,” 13n4; “Moral Attention and the Moral Task of Literature,” 14n10; “Perceptive Equilibrium: Literary Theory and Ethical Theory,” 4; Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life, 24; “Poets as Judges: Judicial Rhetoric and the Judicial Imagination,” 27 Wright, Richard (consideration of), 30, 33, 54, 94, 157, 191 P Parfit, Derek, 1, 3, 12n2, 15n12, 20, 48n3, 68, 70–72, 76, 81n14, 81n15, 93–96, 105, 107, 109, 110n9, 111–115, 117, 119, 121, 142n1, 142n2, 142n3, 142n4, 159, 168, 174n2, 180, 189, 191 relation R (definition of), 189 Sidgwick, Henry (consideration of), 70, 142n4 trolley problems (definition of), 96, 105, 108, 113, 115, 116, 125, 183, 184; Earthquake, 113; Life Boat, 113–115, 119, 159; Side Track (Thomson’s Bystander at the Switch), 174n2

226 

INDEX

Parfit, Derek (cont.) works; Reasons and Persons, 15n12, 48n3, 68, 70, 76, 81n14, 96, 189; On What Matters, 20, 48n3, 70, 96, 159 Percy, William Alexander, 91, 92 works; Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter’s Son, 92 Plato, 10, 20, 22, 70, 86, 87 Pragmatism, 48n5, 116, 195 R Rakowski, Eric, 104, 106, 107, 109 Rawls, John, 1–11, 23, 24, 41, 47, 67, 70, 121, 157, 191 Nussbaum, Martha C. (contemplated by), 1–11, 23, 24, 67, 157, 191 reflective equilibrium (definition of), 8, 9, 41, 121, 191 works; Foreword. The Methods of Ethics (by Sidgwick, Henry), 3, 55, 80n5; A Theory of Justice, 3, 8, 16n13, 47 Repressive state apparatus (RSA) (definition of), 134, 143n15, 166, 167, 194 Rorty, Richard, 3, 33 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 45, 50n15, 97, 98 works; A Discourse on Inequality, 97 S Sartre, Jean-Paul, 35–37, 86, 132, 186–188, 191, 199, 200n4 Scheffler, Samuel, 94, 95 Scruton, Roger, 105 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 155 “To——(‘Corpses are cold in the tomb’),” 155

Shubik, Martin, 99 Sidgwick, Henry, 3, 55, 56, 70, 80n5, 137, 138, 140, 142n4 humility (consideration of), 55, 56 Kant, Immanuel (and), 70, 137 lying (consideration of), 137, 138 Parfit, Derek (and), 70, 142n4 tokens of respect (consideration of), 55, 193 works; The Methods of Ethics, 3, 55, 80n5, 137; “To H. G. Dakyns,” 70 Sinclair, Upton, 34, 38, 74, 75, 85 works; The Jungle, 38, 74, 75, 85 Wright, Richard (influence on), 34, 38, 74 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 55, 57 works; Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, 55 T Teffo, Lesiba, 79n3 works; “Indigenous Life Skills and Moral Regeneration among the Youth,” 79n3; “Supporting African Renaissance: Afrocentric Leadership and the Imperative of Strong Institutions,” 79n3 Thomson, Judith Jarvis, 1, 104–106, 148–151, 153, 154, 159, 162, 165, 168, 174n2 Foot, Philippa (and), 1, 104–106, 148 Parfit, Derek (contemplated by), 1, 105, 159, 174n2 trolley problems; Bystander at the Switch, 150, 151, 154, 165, 168, 174n2; Fat Man, 106, 151; Health-Pebble, 148, 153; Loop Variant, 150; The Trolley Problem, 151, 159, 165

 INDEX 

works; “Kamm on the Trolley Problems,” 105, 162; “Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem,” 104, 105, 151, 159, 165; “The Trolley Problem,” 106, 150, 159, 165, 168 Transcendentalism, 19, 20 Trolley problems Bystander at the Switch, 150, 151, 154, 165, 168, 174n2 Earthquake, 113 Fat Man, 106, 151, 153, 154 Health-Pebble, 148, 149, 153 Life Boat, 111–141, 148–150, 152–155, 159, 162, 171, 174n3, 196, 199 Loop Variant, 150, 151 Parfit, Derek (contemplated by), 113, 117, 119 The Trolley Problem, 104, 150, 165, 168 Wood, Allen W. (contemplated by), 105, 107–109, 119, 120, 123, 124, 177, 183 U Unger, Peter, 105 Utilitarianism, 3, 15–16n12, 23, 24, 82n17, 103, 149 W Walker, Margaret, 35, 36, 38, 85, 185 Williams, Bernard, 3, 6, 7, 24, 33, 190, 191 works; Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 6 Wirth, Louis, 39–41, 49n12, 53, 59 University of Chicago (position at), 39

227

works; “Ideological Aspects of Social Disorganization,” 39; “On Making Values Explicit,” 40; “World Community, World Society, and World Government: An Attempt at a Clarification of Terms,” 53 Wright, Richard (influence on), 39 Wood, Allen W., 44, 45, 47, 70, 72, 81n15, 105, 107–109, 115, 116, 119, 120, 123–125, 158, 164, 177, 181, 183 Allison, Dorothy (quotes), 115, 116, 119 Parfit, Derek (contemplation of), 81n15, 115 trolley problems; Life Boat, 115 works; “Humanity as End in Itself,” 72; Kant’s Ethical Thought, 72; Karl Marx, 44 Wright, Richard African-American nationalism, 35, 194 African Cultural Society (Paris Congress of 1956), 194 birth, 51, 87 Chicago, Illinois, 38 Communist Party, 37, 85, 159, 186 Crane, Stephen (influence of), 61 death (mysterious circumstances), 198 Dostoevsky, Fyodor (influence of), 87, 134 Dreiser, Theodore (influence of), 34, 86 existentialism, 36, 84, 186, 187, 191 Hunter, Oscar, 74 Jackson, Mississippi, 133, 137 James, Henry (influence of), 33, 67, 68, 85 John Reed Club, 66, 81n12

228 

INDEX

Wright, Richard (cont.) Lewis, Sinclair (influence of), 86 London, 36 Mann, Thomas (influence of), 85–87, 120, 127, 145–174 Memphis, Tennessee, 37, 86 Mencken, H. L. (influence of), 167, 178 Natchez, Mississippi, 51 Norris, Frank (influence of), 35 Paris, 35, 187 Sartre, Jean-Paul (influence of), 35, 186, 188, 191, 199 Sinclair, Upton (influence of), 74, 85 University of Chicago, 39 Wirth, Louis (influence of), 39, 53 Wright, Ella (née Wilson) (mother), 51, 52, 79n1, 88, 132 Wright, Nathan (father), 51, 52 works; “Big Boy Leaves Home,” 73–75, 79, 83, 100; Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth, 34; Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos, 159; “Blueprint for Negro Writing: Two Definitions,” 41; “Down by the

Riverside,” 64, 83, 84, 87, 88, 91, 92, 115, 119, 120, 123–127, 141, 145–149, 152, 153, 155–160, 164, 166, 168, 171, 175–185, 199, 200n3; “The Ethics of Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch,” 37; “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” 64, 117, 118; “How Uncle Tom’s Children Grew,” 59, 90, 120, 168; “I Choose Exile,” 83, 109n1, 191; Island of Hallucination, 198; “Long Black Song,” 58, 158–160, 184, 185, 200n3; Native Son, 29, 30, 41, 43, 63, 65, 127, 139; The Outsider, 36, 39, 47, 63, 65, 105, 131, 133; “Silt,” 51–54, 79n1, 83, 84, 91, 94, 126; “Tradition and Industrialization: The Plight of the Tragic Elite in Africa,” 201n8; Uncle Tom’s Children, 1, 54, 55, 57, 58, 60, 62–68, 70, 73, 80n8, 82n18, 83, 84, 100, 118–120, 123, 124, 126, 139, 146, 158, 159, 164, 166, 171, 173, 175, 177, 183–186