Phenomenology and textual power in Richard Wright's "The Man Who Lived Underground".

In Richard Wright's novella "The Man Who Lived Underground," Fred Daniels's descent into an underground sewer to evade the police, who had tortured him into confessing to a murder he did not commit, brings to his consciousness the wretchedness an African American endures as the "other" in a repressive cultural context. His descent also affords him a fortuitous encounter with the wonder of blackness (of silence and darkness), a matrix that forms a lyrical and tactile field, luring him into experiencing finer acts of consciousness. Daniels learns anew to interpret local impressions in ways that negate the assumptions underlying his previous experiences, enabling him to suspend aboveground ideological premises so he can intuit and understand that he had always been victimized by his aboveground status. Such victimization was not based in the nature of things, as an unqualified existential exegesis would suggest. It was contrived by the insidious textual power of the aboveground to plant in him ideas that prevent any healthy cultural transformation.

Edmund Husserl's phenomenological insight, and later developments of it in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, is instructive in a reading of this text. It explains Wright's reliance on externals to convey the inward states of his protagonist (Johnson 13), and it explains the presentational function of these externals in the protagonist's various acts of consciousness. The insights of Robert Scholes's textual theory are also instructive, for they reveal how textual competency can subvert authoritarian discourse formations, the textual power of the aboveground. Though Daniels is cognizant of neither Husserl nor his methodology, his exploration of the underground (his Lebenswelt) is profoundly phenomenological; that is, he dissolves the meaning of conventional cultural and sensory images to reconstruct them on his own terms. Although Daniels clearly is not privy to (post)structuralist thought, his eventual desire to textualize his underground experiences by confronting and having dialogue with those who oppress him signifies his understanding that textual power is power that not only can maintain but also change the world.

Most criticism of Wright's novella has adopted any one or an aggregate of naturalistic, existential, psychological, surrealistic, expressionistic, and structural approaches in addition to platonic, dynamic, and vernacular models in characterizing the underground as exemplary of the restricted world of the African American. Such methodologies, marked by allusions to disease, suffering, stagnation, guilt, the archetype, Gothic horror, madness, defeat, death, and the black (w)hole, "locate" the text either in Wright's symbolic delineation of the ghetto landscape, in his creative process or his philosophical speculation, or in the protagonist's response to his world and quest for understanding. (1) In general, the criticism of Wright's novella to date has framed the protagonist's actions from a disparaging or pejorative viewpoint. I propose a view that is less adversely critical of the protagonist's actions, one that recognizes his success, first through phenomenological reduction and then through textualization, at subduing the forces that restrict his private and public worlds.

As a narrative strategy, Wright's use of Daniels's retreat underground is reminiscent of Bigger's flight in Book Two of Native Son (1940). Bigger dons deception and the "ignorant Negro" disguise to elude the authorities: "The thing to do was to act just like others acted, live like they lived, and while they were not looking, do what you wanted" (Native Son 102). Bigger's disguise is refined in an innocent victim like Daniels, whose descent into the underground becomes a significant motif in Wright's literary concerns. It anticipates Black Boy (1945), in which a nonfictional character is forced to mask his basic attitudes and hide in a personal domain of thoughts and reflections to endure: "I wanted to avoid trouble, for I feared that if I clashed with whites I would lose control of my emotions and spill out words that would be my sentence of death" (220). To survive, Bigger (after breaking free from the environmental determinism of book one of Native Son), Wright (as a youth maturing in the South), and Daniels (after descending into the sewer) are all forced into going underground as a "mode of dissemblance" (JanMohamed 260).

Such a method of survival is not the consequence of an ontological realm predating or exterior to the existing culture. Survival of this sort is an integral function of a particular discourse formation or dominant ideological view that pushes African Americans and other minorities into the negative pole of a phenomenological dialectic. In establishing a racial or an ideological hegemony over this segment of society, the culture of the majority (the aboveground) assumes a position of dominance--the positive pole (the privileged center or the "self")--in this bipolar field of consciousness, which fits the explanation Husserl gives of the phenomenological structure of the acts of perception: the bipolarity of subject intending its object. Forced into adopting the object slot, the negative pole, and peripheral patterns of consciousness as domestic "others," African Americans experience a form of quasi-existence, of relative- or non-being, of cultural and intellectual death.

In adopting dissemblance, Daniels, Bigger, and Wright covertly reject the status of the "other." They temporarily avoid activating the brute force of the police and the soldier, which, in the colonial setting, Frantz Fanon identifies as the catalyst of control over the "other" (Wretched 31). Fanon's conclusions about the colonial world are instructive not only for blacks in a colonial setting in the "third world," but also for blacks victimized by its manifestations in western societies. His conclusions are also instructive in explaining the literary intellectualization of the experience of being black in a Manichaean world; after all, Fanon is partly an heir to Wright's literary legacy and his psychological analysis of racism and oppression. In his study of Native Son, Fanon understands that before Book Two, Bigger is terribly afraid of himself (Black Skin 139); he concludes that blacks must resist the tendency of being the "other," of amputating the self, as encouraged by the psychological destructuring techniques of the colonial world, and must accept and study that self (Black Skin 140).

The ghetto is a manifestation of the colonial world in Western societies, an internal colonial situation. Hence, even when avoiding brute force, Bigger and company still face an internal colonial situation in the educational system, in the structure of moral reflexes of the dominant society, and in other aesthetic expressions of respect, forces much more subtle and compelling in making the oppressed person submit (Wretched 31). Though successful at avoiding momentarily the brute force of authority, Bigger is not capable of combating internal colonialism (e.g., the print and film media that are the major depositors of authoritarian discourse formations). He cannot resist the glitter of the extravagant life of the mainstream, the subtle cultural symbolism and imagery that make him feel inferior and, from the perspective of the aboveground, deserving execution. He is unable to escape, to articulate, or to textualize his experientially learned nascent existentialism.

In Black Boy, Wright is successful at a sort of cultural decolonization. He understands that the oppressor's power to shape the subjectivity of the oppressed is a potent agent of control. He knows that the power of language (textual power) at the cultural level can be used to dispel such control:

   The content of Black Boy describes how Wright managed to resist Jim Crow
   society's attempt to limit his development to that of a "black boy," a
   sub-human creature devoid of initiative and entirely compliant to the will
   of white supremacy, whereas the very existence of Black Boy as an
   articulate and penetrating discursive text demonstrates his ability to
   overcome that drastically limiting formation. In short, Black Boy is a
   testament to the struggle over the formation of black subjectivity in a
   racist society. (JanMohamed 246)

Daniels is illustrative of the move from Bigger's ignorance of textual power to Wright's skill in generating counter-cultural texts. He liberates his subjectivity from aboveground control and heroically decides that he must generate a text about his underground discoveries so that those discoveries will be accessible to the aboveground.

Daniels's decision to go underground occurs as he intuits a particular connectedness between himself and the sewer. He knows he must either hide or surrender. The sewer beckons him: "a sudden movement in the street caught his attention. A throng of tiny columns of water snaked into the air from the perforations of a manhole cover" (Wright, Man 27).2 Lowering himself into the manhole and into the sewer, he sinks into the darkness until he allows his body to drop. After he hits bottom, "[h]is head was battered against a wall and he wondered if this were death" (28). But this is no descent into Hades. Metaphorically, Daniels descends into blackness, his own preconsciousness, beyond the Freudian barrier screening the unconscious from the conscious that controls voluntary movement and mental attention. The preconsciousness that he discovers underground creates the masks and other evasive forms that African Americans devise in a racist context to achieve self-expression, freedom, and self-fulfillment (Miller 127-28). Here Daniels, in the sewer, reverses the conventional Western stigmatization of blackness delineated in Manichaeism and medieval Christianity, elaborated in the neoclassical poetry of the Enlightenment, and fully exploited by pro-slavery imperialists as justification for American slavery. This stigmatization of blackness was used later by Negrophobes as a rationale for Jim Crow treatment of African Americans in the South and in northern cities. But in Daniels's underground terrain, blackness signifies a new realm. It does not carry the negative, empty, sterile semantic presence that it does aboveground. Daniels discovers throughout his tenure underground that blackness unblinds him and enables him to suspend, understand, and traverse a field of consciousness independent of the aboveground.

This new realm initially is a stratum of darkness in which objects of Daniels's perception are not well circumscribed and that requires him to use unfamiliar tools of perception. Using a metal pole left behind by a sewer workman as if it is an explorer's staff, he discovers an old sewer, a cave that is transformed into the symbolic center of his subjectivity, enabling him to conduct a full phenomenological project. (3) The cave provides Daniels an uncontaminated realm of understanding in which he can examine whether the world of his daily life, the aboveground, is real or merely an illusion. In this new realm, Daniels becomes a cultural and ideological explorer, an archaeologist of ideational freedom who, after discovering a new site, can excavate "the repressed layers of his consciousness" (JanMohamed 265) to locate, in his own reflection, a zone of being.

As a realm of being within the aboveground realm of being, the cave makes Daniels adroit at sensing subtle rhythms in his subjectivity, rhythms that the aboveground has forced him to suppress. He discerns, for example, a "feathery cadence" that draws him out of the cave to a wall, through which he hears singing from a basement church service; "Jesus, take me to your home above" (32) is the lament in the lyrics he hears. Daniels's desire to discover whose church it is without being observed encourages him to look around, "then upward": "[he] was startled to see a bright sliver of light slicing the darkness like the blade of a razor" (32). Through this crevice Daniels sees a black congregation, clad in white robes, singing. "His first impulse was to laugh, but he checked himself" (32).

Daniels has not studied phenomenological methodology. However, his new context cultivates a latent and nascent consciousness, as exemplified by the provocative simile of the light as razor "slicing the darkness," allowing him not simply to perceive objects as part of the mundane world, but to experience these objects as part of an assumption behind the text his perceptions formulate. Having experienced the Manichaean light of the Christian gospel severing (penetrating) his and the congregation's sense of self (or of darkness), Daniels seizes "upon a meaning immanent to the sensible before all judgment" (Kullman and Taylor 132). Manichaeism, essential in this field of objects, encourages the black singers to ascend to a liminal incorporation by the hegemonic "other," submitting to the implicit ideological premises of the Light (good/sacred) --Dark (evil/profane) dualism of Western religion. The lament in the lyrics expresses a desire to be white, to be the "other," to be transported to a better world "above." Daniels's first impulse is to laugh at the congregation.

Because Daniels's natural attitude is suspended only in part, his new awareness is crushed by a sense of guilt; hence he checks his laughter. "Would God strike him dead for that [laughing]?" (32). Weighing on Daniels is the aboveground conditioning that clashes with his newly emerging attitude about the aboveground. This clash transforms his preconsciousness into a site of ideological contestation. As Daniels's defiance of the aboveground is momentary, he settles on a synthesis: "A vague conviction made him feel that those people should stand unrepentant and .yield no quarter in singing and praying" (33).

Before Daniels can maintain his new attitude, he must suspend all common sense "realism" in the objects he perceives. In achieving and moving beyond this suspension, the first step in the phenomenological project, he must become a disinterested observer, transforming his perceptual immersion into a spontaneous concern with the very activity of consciousness itself (Natanson 13). Daniels must adopt an attitude that avoids the brooding, self-pitying, and nonreflective thinking that he indulges in after he leaves the crevice and encounters a floating, nude, dead baby. As a metaphor for death and cultural decimation, the baby represents the naked centrality of negated existence and consciousness that the aboveground imposes on "others" and that Daniels confronts in his excursions underground. Contemplating the baby, Daniels feels "the same nothingness he had felt while watching the men and women singing in the church" (34). Though Daniels is not able to completely suspend the aboveground, he is captivated in the darkness by the objects he observes, as described by the eidetic imagery and realized by his contemplation: "The [baby's] eyes were closed, as though in sleep; the fists were clenched, as though in protest" (34). He does not fully realize the meaning of an object's essence, but such eidetic intuition drives him on a quest for clarity and understanding of the "natural" or "naive" viewpoint present in his preconsciousness.

The underground is composed of many subdivisions, chambers, conduits, and levels, most of which Daniels explores by digging tunnels, by peering through cracks and keyholes, by using doors, ascending and descending steps and staircases, all of which determine the complexity, the multidimensional frame, the dangers, and the distractions of Daniels's private world. Each significant instance of scrutiny in Daniels's world is reflective (a moment of his own self-directed apprehension, perception, interpretation) or non-reflective (an instance of the evasive thinking illustrative of aboveground penetration and conditioning). By exploring the underground, Daniels locates and unearths the layered sediments in his consciousness; by doing so, he reconstructs his Lebenswelt, altering symbolically the underground pathways and creating new avenues of perception and conception.

Digging through a brick wall with an iron pipe, then tunneling in the darkness, Daniels begins his formal probe of the underground. His initial effort at exploration yields what might be best characterized as another reminder of death and social paralysis. The odor of embalming fluid from a cadaver and the "blinding glare" from a light he clicks on, leaving him at least momentarily "sightless, defenseless" (36), unveil an undertaker's establishment. The odor, the light, and the referential meaning of the cadaver bring a synesthetic reminder of death: "At once he knew that he had been dimly aware of this odor in the darkness, but the light had brought it sharply to his attention" (36, emphasis added). In arriving at this point of investigation of the underground, Daniels discovers that to break out of a presupposed phenomenal field requires a monumental effort and a discerning instrumentality different from that of the aboveground. For example, he must partially release his reliance on a visual receptor system that may carry Manichaean reminders of his status aboveground. Tunneling in the darkness before arriving at the funeral home, he is forced to navigate space with tactile perception. As "his fingers toyed in space, like the antennae of an insect" (35), Daniels experiences his bodily space as a matrix for action and realizes what Merleau-Ponty theorizes: that the body (the kinesthetic perspective), not simply the optical perspective, is one of our chief receptors and foundations of perceptual experience (Merleau-Ponty 98-147, 206; Johnson viii). The richness of Daniels's heightened tactile sensation in the darkness contrasts with his impoverished visual perception in the light. This experience encourages him to disregard his contemplation of the cadaver. Instead, Daniels descends the stairs in the undertaker's establishment and discovers a tool chest containing a medley of tools, symbols of potential new ways of seeing and thinking, which arm him for prolonged struggle in the reconquest of his subjectivity.

Such a quest at this juncture does not involve Daniels establishing the neutrality of the given, but it does involve his attempt to gain dominion and control over the given as it manifests in disturbing instances of the aboveground he encounters in the underground; he does so by either bracketing his reactions to those instances, or by collecting mementos of value that represent metaphors or metonymies of those instances. The theater episode is the most immediate case in point. Before hoisting the tool chest to his shoulders, Daniels notices a door behind the furnace that he discovers leads into the basement of a theater. "It seemed that he was playing a game with an unseen person whose intelligence outstripped his" (37). The glowing red letters of the theater's exit sign draw Daniels inside, where he observes an audience of theatergoers. This episode shows how a seemingly innocent, entertaining distraction like a movie can dominate attention, thwart reasoning, and hence shape an individual's or a group's vision of the world. Seduced and coaxed by the illusory images of the movie, the theatergoers escape from the psychic pain of their frustratingly impotent and powerless lives. The movie is a pronounced imposition and penetration by the aboveground culture, for the viewers are eager to accept the reified imagery of the naive natural attitude on the screen as real, in place of the phenomenological attitude at the eidetic phase, which would suggest that the images are seen as only one possible set of an infinite number of silhouettes of reality (Bossert 56-57). The viewers thereby relinquish control of their subjectivity and accept a form of social death in contrast to an active, clarifying life of the mind. As Daniels studies the viewers, he notes that they "were children, sleeping in their living, awake in their dying" (38). But his impulse is to "awaken" the audience, to tell them that they are laughing at and accepting false images of themselves.

Yet just as the theater's jerking shadows invade the inner space of its viewers and distort their vision, Daniels is also influenced by his exposure to hegemonic formations that implicitly shape his conception of himself. As part of his own nonreflective dialectic, Daniels is seized by the same "impulse he had had to tell the people in the church to stop their singing" (38). Charged by an empathy that encourages him to see the audience as kindred others, Daniels experiences a messianic fantasy: "he stepped out of the box, walked out upon thin air, walked on down to the audience; and, hovering in the air just above them, he stretched out his hand to touch them" (38). Daniels envisions himself saving these people. But the delusional form of this egocentric, self-deceptive, solipsistic fantasy snaps like a burst bubble under the tension of his newly evolving consciousness. He cannot reclaim them or himself this way.

The continuous tapping of what turns out to be a typewriter eventually draws Daniels into a series of episodes in which he seizes a radio from a radio shop, a cleaver from a meat market, and an idea for getting a safe's combination. After obtaining the safe's combination by observing a shop employee stealing a portion of the money, Daniels struggles with the idea of stealing and attempts to rationalize its lure and his weak dialectic with it: "he was intrigued with the form and color of the money, with the manifold reactions which he knew that men aboveground held toward it" (55).

The typewriter, which had droned on in the underground caverns with a continuous tapping before Daniels became infatuated with the safe, is also in the shop. Skill in using a typewriter is an unbracketed aboveground symbol of his desire to be white, to be a professional; it is a symbol of a life with meaning. As such, when Daniels uses the typewriter for the first time in his life, he unwittingly participates in his own negative self-creation. He spells "in a soft diffident voice" as he types out his name in lower case letters with no spacing: "freddaniels" (55). But Daniels does realize that the typewriter's value springs from the same economy of subjection as the cleaver, the radio, and the money: "They were the serious toys of the men who lived in the dead world of sunshine and rain he had left, the world that had condemned him, branded him guilty" (55). Yet Daniels is clearly unable to bracket his responses to the world that subjects him when he discovers that he is in a jewelry shop. He checks the safe again and sees diamonds, hundreds of rings, and watches. "Were they worth anything? He scooped up a handful and jets of fire shot fitfully from the stones" (56). As he opens a box of watches, "[a] chorus of soft, metallic ticking filled his ears. For a moment he could not move" (56-57). Before lugging his loot back to the cave, Daniels fleetingly discerns an opaque silhouette of himself, a specular image mirroring the weakness of his dialectic with the aboveground. He looks up and is "momentarily frightened by his shadow" (58).

Back in the uncontaminated ontology of his cave, Daniels's contemplation of his loot and his experiences underground, including his recollection of the congregation's singing, the people in the theater, the dead baby, and the cadaver in the undertaker's establishment, suggests "that some dim meaning linked them together, that some magical relationship made them kin [...] that all of these images, with their tongueless reality, were striving to tell him something" (59). More aware of his circumstance because of his underground excursions, Daniels moves beyond experiencing objects in the context provided by the aboveground cultural field. He doubts the implicit presuppositions of his previous thinking and refuses to accept uncritically such premises.

The abstract imagery of "dim meaning," "magical relationship," and "tongueless reality" posits a new epistemological link between Daniels and the objects of his reflection. It speaks to the significance of his having achieved phenomenological suspension, a suspension that prepares him for stage two of the Husserlian phenomenological reductions, eidetic reduction. In this stage he can appreciate his purified field of consciousness as he attends to each object gathered in his cave, pinpointing each object's essential character (pure form) by identifying the generic properties of its class (its status aboveground). So too do Daniels's activities in his cave prepare him for eidetic reduction, particularly his arrangement of the objects, his search for and discovery of live wires for the electric light bulb, and his work to rig up the radio by grounding the antenna wires. The "sudden illumination" and music he enjoys (60) exemplify Daniels's dominion over his cave, his sharpness of vision, his clarity regarding the objects before him, and his newfound ability to ground in his own subjectivity what he contemplates.

With eidetic reduction as a device of investigation, Daniels's cave becomes not simply a cache for loot but a richly endowed iconographic field in which he can realize how the objects of cognition are constituted by the activities of his mind. Preoccupied with setting up the electric bulb and radio and with his new illumination, Daniels remembers that he has forgotten the money. After perusing it, "[h]e had no desire whatever to count the money; it was what it stood for--the various currents of life swirling aboveground--that captivated him" (60). Daniels's lack of interest in counting the money is a clear bracketing of it. His eidetic reduction captivates him, revealing that, as an icon, the money is connected with the various hegemonic ideologies that flow aboveground and that a grounding with these ideologies connects one with the life of the elect there. Hence, to count the money is to plug into the live wires of aboveground currents, thereby disconnecting his subjectivity from its proper source, its own current (culture). The other items of his loot, though diverse, are fundamentally similar; they are the emotion-laden, unexpressed embodiment of habits of the mind, of images and symbols that occupy his mind (his preconsciousness and consciousness). They influence his behavior and his conceptualization of the world. Daniels has discovered the phenomenological source of his previous domination by the aboveground. But to break clear from this domination and to arrive at the source of his own consciousness, Daniels must, in transcendental reduction, bracket the aboveground world of his own ego (Natanson 13).

Although Daniels remembers the police and his aboveground experiences, he forgets his name and his reason for being underground. As showing no regret or concern signifies, he has created a context in which he can relinquish his belief in his own mundane existence as a human being in the aboveground world, laying the groundwork for the construction of a new world. Kimberly W. Benston's thesis, "the topos of (un)naming," suggests that African American fictional characters who adopt or reject labels do so as a celebration of freedom (151-72). Wright's protagonist is not so dominated by the aboveground label at this point that he mythopoeically needs to consciously and ritualistically cast off his name. Rather, his unnaming goes deeper. He merely forgets his name. In doing so, he experiences a further breakdown of aboveground values. Retention is part of intentionality (the essential nexus between subject and object in experience) in the sense that consciousness of what was (or has been), not mere consciousness of what now is, shapes perception and understanding (Husserl 53-54). The protagonist's lack of retention of his old patterns, symbolized in forgetting his name, allows new patterns of perception and conception to emerge. He thus can subvert the aboveground bipolar field of consciousness that casts him in his old identity as object, as the "other."

In Husserlian phenomenological topography, the noematic (objective) dimension is the most important. It is this dimension of intentionality that is the clue to the intuition of essence, the directional quality of consciousness. All consciousness is consciousness of something; all thinking is thinking of or about something. Noema (the object) is the intentional meaning: the meant correlate to the act which intends it (Natanson 14-15). But consciousness can be tautological (not only can the subject intend its object, but the opposite is also true), causing the objective status to become problematic, unless one considers the intentional structure involved in assertive judgments. When, for example, Wright's protagonist does not self-reflect or assert himself (his own ontology), does not intend an object that is real for him, his being is reduced to the object slot or the "other." As the protagonist teaches himself to make capital letters and spaces on the typewriter and as he papers the walls of his cave with the money, he intends his own object; and the construction of his new world has begun. He now dominates the aboveground icons of control rather than being dominated by them. No longer participating in his own negative formation, the protagonist asserts self by typing a sentence neatly and correctly, for "it was merely the ritual of performing the thing that appealed to him" (61). The narrative voice reports that, after papering the walls, the protagonist "had triumphed over the world aboveground! He was free! If only people could see this! He wanted to run from this cave and yell his discovery to the world" (62).

The protagonist becomes his "own foundation," as Fanon would say (Black Skin 231). Abdul JanMohamed would argue that, for liberation to be automatic, it cannot be conscious: "it has to become a part of one's pre-conscious behavior pattern." Or, to the contrary, "precisely at the point where one's behavior is unconsciously controlled by a prevailing ideology, one has succumbed to a cultural hegemony" (258). Quoting Ren6 M6nil, Fanon explains that unconscious control is "the consequence of the replacement of the repressed [African, and, I would add, African American] spirit in the consciousness of the slave by an authority symbol representing the Master, a symbol implanted in the subsoil of the collective group and charged with maintaining order in it as a garrison controls a conquered city" (Black Skin 145).

To accentuate his dominance over his subjectivity and to exercise his intentionality, the protagonist makes the cave his hide-out, his mental sanctuary; it is a symbolic space in which he invents games that celebrate his defiance of the aboveground values in ritual. He drives a nail into the wall of his garrison and hangs the bloody cleaver on it, a trophy emblematic of his conquest over the aboveground values. He also amuses himself by driving nails through the papered walls and hanging watches and rings on them.

The protagonist's most momentous game extolling his liberation comes as he imagines he is a rich man aboveground "in the obscene sunshine," strolling through the park, smoking an after-breakfast cigar (63). He had previously dumped a jar of diamonds on the ground, forming a neat heap. As he imagines himself strolling, he crosses the floor of the cave, at first avoiding the diamonds, "yet subtly gauging his footsteps so that his shoes [...] would strike the diamonds at some undetermined moment. After twenty minutes of sauntering, his right foot smashed into the heap and diamonds lay scattered" (64). Playfully and effortlessly, he topples another aboveground edifice of value. Even the scattered diamonds, in their noematic role, emphatically collaborate in their own personified devaluation by "glinting with a million tiny chuckles of icy laughter" (64). The protagonist "felt that he had a glorious victory locked in his heart" (64).

The absolute goal of all phenomenological inquiry is pure consciousness as it manifests itself in the transcendental ego, the source of all intentional acts. The transcendental ego, as consciousness in its ultimate generality, makes possible the existence of individual empirical egos and their individuated empirical realities. The pure consciousness of the transcendental ego is the residuum which remains after the various phenomenological reductions, after the protagonist has toppled the last discourse on value and has discovered a purified intentionality, a pre-predicative (preobjective) world void of ontological considerations, but a world that nevertheless has a conscious life, a stream of thought in its integrity, with all of its cogitations and experiences (Schutz 29). The protagonist becomes mindful of how absolutely free he is in intending his own consciousness with an idea that comes to him in an inverted Manichaean form: "A ghostly light bathed the cave" (64). The protagonist ponders whether anything is right: "Yes, if the world as men had made it was right, then anything else was right, any act a man took to satisfy himself, murder, theft, torture" (64). Here the protagonist, having exposed the transcendental ego, has achieved, in phenomenological reflection, a value-free a priori condition, a condition of infinite possibilities in shaping his destiny and building a new value system. He can begin a cultural genesis.

But he realizes almost immediately that he has arrived at the same level of freedom from which the police operate.

His awareness of the implication of his conclusions makes him feel guilty, and he is apprehensive that he will commit some nameless offense. He turns on the radio to calm himself and hears a "melancholy piece of music" (64). As the music ends, the protagonist shuts off the radio and wonders: "What was the matter with him? [...] It was these walls; these crazy walls were filling him with a wild urge to climb out into the dark sunshine aboveground" (65). The blues encourages him, as does the benevolence of his phenomenological reflection ("these walls"), to leave the underground and have a dialogue with someone about his experiences. The sharpness of his vision, its "militant distinctness" and increasing exactness of the phenomenological evidence (the "self-giveness"), demands that he must return aboveground to narrate and textualize his experiences and discoveries.

An even more obligatory cue that he should return aboveground to document his findings is the new understanding his insurgent consciousness reveals about objects he now perceives in the underground. After shutting the radio off and banishing the shouting walls by dousing the light, the protagonist dozes until he fully awakens and hears singing from the church. He returns to the narrow slit. A young black woman sings in a tone that expresses "meanings which her conscious mind did not know" (67). The protagonist realizes that the emotional and jubilant style of the gospel keeps from the singer's consciousness a psychic pain that would encourage her to bracket her behavior; it allows instead a controlling symbol to surface: a sublimating lyricism calling for obedience to God and avoidance of sin to gain heaven's reward through God's love. The young woman is not aware of, and has no desire to be aware of, what is influencing her: "so glad / I got Jesus in my soul" (67). She represents all the men and women standing between the pews who join in on her hymn, glad because they have refused the torment implicit in the self-reflective thought which would reveal that their own cultural heritage has been substituted by an alien ontological realm, by a white symbol, converting their behavior into social death. The singers are famous in their self-deception, content in their use of religion to sublimate their suffering, perpetually awaiting an apocalyptic event that will unearth the aboveground system.

The protagonist finds such complacency contemptible, or at least a resolve he must reject: "He felt that their search for a happiness they could never find made them feel that they had committed some dreadful offense which they could not remember or understand" (68). The protagonist's appraisal of the singers is not an attack on their inability to accept that the nature of life is existential suffering, for that would suggest that their status aboveground is not imposed but ontological. The protagonist rejects their fear, their unwillingness to recognize that their efforts to sublimate misery by forgetting their inferior status violate their being, their social formation, their acquisition of pure consciousness.

The amnesia of the singers explains the protagonist's response after discovering that a radio shop boy is being beaten and falsely accused of stealing the radio and that the night watchman, Thompson, is being tortured into confessing the theft of the money by the same policemen who had beaten and forced him to confess. Although feeling some pity for the boy, the protagonist finds the beating funny, for its consequences will not necessarily be the intended results; it may induce in the boy a bracketing of his aboveground existence. "[P]erhaps the beating would bring to the boy's attention, for the first time in his life, the secret of his existence, the guilt that he could never get rid of" (69): i.e., his acceptance of the aboveground natural attitude.

The boy's beating is symbolically linked with the brutal interrogation of the night watchman. As the protagonist watches, he knows he can help Thompson, but, "although he was not guilty of the crime of which he had been accused, he was guilty, had always been guilty" (70). Thompson is guilty of the same kind of amnesia that victimizes both the shop boy and the congregation; they are all trying to forget their slave status. But Thompson's predicament is more immediate and more graphic an illustration.

The "police state"-style interrogation of Thompson is an extension of the fundamental pattern of a slave society. All forms of slavery, Orlando Patterson suggests, are characterized by the slave's social death, his powerlessness, and his pronounced sense of dishonor (2-14; JanMohamed 248). The slave's status is an ersatz life; death is commuted conditionally; life can be revoked at the master's pleasure. The slave in this society is a nonbeing, a domestic other, and his condition is what Patterson describes as "natal alienation" (7-9): perpetual, inheritable.

The beating that the shop boy receives will help him gain control of his subjectivity and will provoke the self-reflective thought that will help him understand that the aboveground authorities are not concerned with whether he is innocent. The authorities are more concerned with controlling both the boy's and Thompson's subjectivity, or, as Fanon would say, with creating "around the exploited person[s] an atmosphere of submission and of inhibition" (Wretched 31), forcing those persons to acknowledge their slave status or face death.

After the policemen leave the room, Thompson stumbles across the floor to a desk drawer, takes out a gun, and, contrary to the purpose of the interrogation, shoots himself. The police convince themselves, even without the loot in Thompson's possession, that his corpse is proof enough that he is guilty. For the police, Thompson had to be guilty. If he were not convinced of the value of the stolen items or afraid of dying, then they had lost control of his subjectivity.

Paradoxically, Thompson's suicide is positive. It is an alternative to paralysis and social death; it is a transcendent moral negation. "Negation and `actual death' are the positive transformation of the negation already inflicted by `social death'" (JanMohamed and Lloyd 11). Thompson's behavior informs the protagonist's, as does the behavior of the singing congregation. They are all part of the collective straggle; and though the singing congregation accepts social death, Thompson is forced beyond his fear to realize the implication of his status. The protagonist returns to his cave and recapitulates the entire history of the group by waiting for what seems to be a millennium; then he decides to act, to return aboveground, even if returning means choosing Thompson's form of transcendence.

In the aboveground he stood, "swaying in a world so fragile that he expected it to collapse" (74). Here the phenomenon of lyrical and tactile darkness is as fragile in his memory and consciousness as the elusive tropes of a poem. Here "the writing in fact," as Fabre states, "becomes its own story" (219). Catching his reflection of soiled raggedness in the long mirror of a man's clothing store, the protagonist realizes, to use the post-structuralist notion of textuality, that his rejection by the members of the church congregation, after he decides to go in and tell his story, is based on their lack of textual competency and on an unwillingness to even attempt to exercise textual power. (See Bogumil and Molino.) The congregation is unable to scrupulously scrutinize the protagonist as a text, unable to recognize and receive, to read and interpret permutations of textuality outside or beyond the perimeters established by the sacred texts of the aboveground status quo. Because in the aboveground individual acts of interpretation are presided over by a single, monological interpretive community, what the individuals of the congregation read and interpret as sacred, significant, credible, and tolerable--values, worth, money, appearance--remains enshrined in the language of texts celebrating acceptable norms. The protagonist understands, nevertheless, that his experiences are only accessible to others in textual form.

Despite the protagonist's earnest desire to narrate his story, and despite the congregation's implicit desire to have the liberation which the protagonist can offer them ("Tell me again your story" [75]), the controlling matrix in their subjectivity, the Manichaean allegory, prevents the free play of conventional semantic and epistemological elements necessary for a felicitous reading of his text or for the recovery of a basis for an instructive pretext. For the congregation, and indeed for most of the people whom the protagonist encounters in the aboveground, there is no metadiscursive language. There is no text to describe the referential aberration in the protagonist's subjective experience of the metaphysical and ontological "other." As Bakish argues, "widely assumed interpretations of basic light-dark contrasts make the Negro's positive interpretation of his color and his inner self a more difficult task. An entirely new culture of imagery and symbols for blackness may be necessary" (21). The protagonist, therefore, welcomes the idea of someone calling the police to force him to leave or at least of going to the police himself and making a statement. "What statement? He did not know. He was the statement [his own text], and since it was all so clear to him, surely he would be able to make it clear to others" (76-77).

What makes the protagonist a text is that he represents all of the lyrical, tactile, and kinesthetic signifiers of his underground experiences. Interpreters will be able to read him as a text if he can bring upon himself the primary and secondary systems of textual theory (Scholes 161-62). The primary system is the code, the rules of the game, the logic of his behavior emerging from his underground experiences as a result of dislodging the Manichaean allegory and taking control of his subjectivity. This system forms the subtext of the protagonist's behavior and encodes it as text. Interpretation, one of the secondary systems, can be brought to bear only if an interpreter can comprehend the primary system. Revealing the code and revealing himself as text is the protagonist's impetus for going to the police. However, the protagonist is naive about the police's desire to read the text of an "other."

At first, the protagonist does not believe that his story is beyond expression, understanding, and reception. His meditation presupposes an ideally informed reader (receiver) like that enunciated by Stanley Fish: that the interaction of the protagonist and, for instance, the police would be like the interaction of a fully articulated text and a competent reader "who does everything within his power to make himself informed" (Fish 49). Earnest dialogue between himself and the police will make his message clear, the protagonist believes.

As arrogant servants of the aboveground interpretative community and thereby the specific discourse formation of that ideological group, the police are freed from obligation to a new text and are not interested in dialogue with those they subvert. To communicate is to exist absolutely for the "other." Interpretation is never totally free; it is restricted by such prior acquisitions as beliefs, social patterns, language, and generic norms (Scholes 150). Instead of engaging in dialogue, the function of the police is to inflict on African Americans the experience of living through others. Fanon argues that "every ontology is made unattainable in a colonized and civilized society" (Black Skin 109). The aboveground ontology prevents the being of blacks; not only must blacks be black, they must be black in relation to whites (Black Skin 110). Hence, at the police station, the police ignore the protagonist at first, until he mentions Mrs. Peabody, the murder victim: "The policemen were very quiet now, looking at him intently. `What do you know about Mrs. Peabody's death, boy?'" (79). Only as an index to an already established dominance or subtext will the police have dialogue with the protagonist.

In answer to the police's inquiry and as a steadfast means of initiating a dialogue with them and at the same time holding their attention, the protagonist uses some sophistry by encouraging them to use a particular interpretive strategy: "Nothing, sir. But they said I killed her. But it doesn't make any difference. I'm guilty!" (80). When the police do not understand, the protagonist concludes that the "distance between what he felt and what these men meant was vast. Something told him, as he stood there looking into their faces, that he would never be able to tell them, that they would never believe him even if he told them" (80). The protagonist's meditation indicates that he believes at this point that his message is inscrutable to the police, that for them there is no identity between the object (his message) and the signified (himself), that there is no interaction between what the police perceive and the interpretive code he is trying to reveal. The aboveground subtext is exerting profound pressure on the police's perception, making them unable to entertain new meanings. The question is, how can the protagonist break through this selectivity, this view that already-defined meanings are univocally fixed to signifiers?

One of the policemen escorts the protagonist upstairs to a room where the three detectives who had forced him to confess (Lawson, Murphy, and Johnson) are playing cards. Here the protagonist, in order to break through the normative view of the signifying function of the aboveground, seeks an opening to that language system, a space of potential meaning between the signifier and signified. In that room, though puzzled by the three detectives' responses to him, the protagonist believes "he had to force the reality of himself upon them" (82). The protagonist intends to introduce himself as a new concept (a new idea, a new signified); by facing his accusers, he intends to constrain the symbolic system of the aboveground, the set of signs that dismisses him as an "other," to accommodate him, either by changing his identity in the old signified or by viewing the old signified as an effect whose signifier must be sought. Robert Scholes would express the transformation differently:

   In every language there are words for certain things not because language
   has `chosen' arbitrarily to create those words but because the things were
   sufficiently there to force language to accommodate them[...] .[T]he
   signifiers may be arbitrary but the signifieds are motivated by reference,
   which flows not only from the word to the thing but from the thing to the
   word. (97)

Scholes illustrates the instability of the bipartite Saussurean sign by explaining how language is not a total system independent of physical reality and that new concepts (signifieds) can be introduced into a language via a process that is an inversion of the signifier/signified relationship. Again, the protagonist initiates the same process by turning himself in to the police and encouraging them to bring him before his accusers. He provides, moreover, incontrovertible proof of his ability to defy his accusers, to transcend the restrictions of his previous slave status.

The protagonist becomes the genesis of a new culture. As such, he is a new text. Accordingly, he must specify and legitimize his discourse. He succeeds when he declares that he witnessed Thompson's interrogation and suicide. Lawson knows this legitimizes the protagonist's discourse because he could not have known about it any other way: he could not have read about it in the papers because Lawson had not filed the reports yet. Once Lawson acknowledges the protagonist, he immediately recognizes the threat this new text poses, particularly to himself but also to the "white man's world" (89) that he and his associates are charged with maintaining. The protagonist has incriminating evidence against Lawson, but he also has the resolve to topple the Manichaean ontology. His goal is to show others "what he had seen, then they would feel what he had felt and they in turn would show it to others [...] and soon everybody would be governed by the same impulse of pity" (89). This is the code of the new text. Lawson explains to his associates that they cannot let the protagonist go: "If we let him go, he'll squeal that we framed him" (85). He explains: "You've got to shoot his kind. They'd wreck things" (92), but can one shoot an idea or kill a text?

The protagonist does succeed in subverting the aboveground hegemony, for he does take control of his own subjectivity and generate a new text. His story, explained by phenomenological reduction and textual power, illustrates how those relegated to the negative pole or object slot of phenomenological bipolarity can liberate themselves from the ideological premises and from discourse formations that victimize them and avert their healthy cultural formation.

Notes

(1.) For example, McCall, in examining Wright's delineation of the ghetto, notes that the black is forced underground in America and that the descent is madness. In a similar orientation, Everette argues that Wright creates a pessimistic story, retrospectively becoming a metaphor for the death of the optimism at the end of Black Boy. Focusing his analysis on Wright's creative process, Miller recognizes that the original manuscript--the first two sections of which were edited out to produce the novella in its present form--best captures a conceptually inexplicable dynamism that Wright believed was characteristic and expressive of the felt reality of African Americans (95-96). Watkins celebrates Wright's consummate craftsmanship in a structural approach, noting a sustained dramatic irony in the novella. She concentrates on the story's naturalistic and existential contents, in which she sees Wright pairing deterministic and antideterministic parts.

Felgar suggests that Wright uses literature as a vehicle for philosophical speculation. According to Felgar, Wright uses surrealism and expressionism in articulating his subject of exclusion. Ridenour explains that Wright's protagonist is "an extreme product of the collective, social, neurosis" of the machine age (56). Walker believes "Wright is seeking to construct a moral dialectic for human suffering outside and beyond the moral system of Christianity, outside Communism, and even outside Christian and religious existentialism" (176).

Underscoring the protagonist's response to his world, Bone classifies the novella as an existential fable by attending to its fabulous plot, surrealistic style, and variation on the theme of nihilism. But he concludes that "[t]o be driven underground is to suffer spiritual death, to be the victim of metaphysical annihilation" (26). Brignano suggests that one cannot dismiss without an argument the racial bearing of the story. To Brignano, the hero is not driven but escapes symbolically into "the underground of the mind" (150). Bakish also views the hero's action as flight, and he sees the cave in Freudian terms, as a mother's womb. In explaining the guilt motif, Fabre notes "that this guilt [...] is such a basic psychological fact that it represents (in the Kantian sense) one of the forms of the human mind, the mark of our condition" (213).

McNallie shows how Wright's cave is linked vitally to both truth and renewal of life. To McNallie, "an inverted copy of Plato's parable" is the controlling model (77), and "the quest is an internal one" (81). In a poststructuralist vernacular theory, Baker argues that Daniels is a liminal figure, a zero image, hovering between two worlds in a black (w)hole (159, 164, 171-72). Baker does attempt a phenomenological consideration of the novella, but his discussion is diminutive and it reduces Daniels's formative actions to those of "a ludic clown" and thief, a character who achieves only an inarticulate victory (166-72).

(2.) All quotes from the novella are taken from Richard Wright's Eight Men (1987).

(3.) Husserl's phenomenological method is about an immediate confrontation with what is presented in experience. The protagonist (or phenomenologist) first must assure the neutrality of givenness of any object by suspending or setting into abeyance (placing into doubt) his belief in the "general thesis" of the "natural standpoint" of the "real world." Husserl calls this the epoche; it is a type of mathematical bracketing (Natanson 10-14). The next step is a series of reductions, two phases of which are principally important. The first of these is "eidetic reduction" in which the phenomenologist, after having bracketed the given, studies its character, focusing primarily on universal and not on contingent qualities. The phenomenologist attends to the essence of a pure form, the generic properties of a specific class.

Transcendental reduction is the second phase of reductions; it is a new way of looking at things that contrasts at every point with the "natural standpoint" or "natural attitude of the real world.". Instead of living in one's acts of perception, one makes perception the very object of phenomenological inspection. The "subject" or "worldliness of the ego" is being bracketed here. From this bracketing, the phenomenologist is returned to a pure stream of consciousness. This is the ultimate (a priori or, as Merleau-Ponty insists upon calling it, prepredicative) ground of the transcendental ego in whose formulating, meaning producing, or constitutive activity the phenomenologist's world arises (Kullman and Taylor 23). Transcendental reduction results in exposing the intentionality of consciousness.

Radiating as it does from the Transcendental Ego, intentionality of consciousness is best understood as a schema (S [right arrow]) in which a subject, while seemingly perceiving its object, is actually intending it. Consciousness is always consciousness of something selected as object. Yet, acts of consciousness are primarily influenced by the way objects present themselves. As a consequence, intentionality has subjective (noesis, noetic) and objective (noema, noematic) aspects. Both aspects are non-realities or modifications of the intentional object due to activities of the mind (Schutz 30). In the subjective aspect, in the act of thinking or perceiving itself, there are a priori categories (of space and time, of quantity, of number); there are pre-experienced cogitations or unconscious inferences (memory and association); and there are ideas (language and other symbolic forms or manifestations of culture). All enable the subject to perceive and coordinate perceptions of objects.

The objective aspect, the object of thought or the perceived, is how objects appear through acts of consciousness. What is perceived is only one aspect of the thing, leaving most of the intentional object to the "intuition" of essence. For example, that aspect of the thing caught by a perceiving subject suggests other aspects: the front side of a cathedral suggests its back, the facade the interior, the spires the unseen foundation, etc. This is the "inner horizon" of the cathedral. Its outer horizon places it into a physical and/or philosophical or aesthetic context. Every perception of a detail refers to the thing to which it is related or stands out against (its background), and that which the subject cannot see he judges to be there.

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--. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove, 1963.

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--. "The Man Who Lived Underground." Eight Men. New York: Thunder's Mouth P, 1987.27-92.

--. Native Son. New York: Harper & Row, 1940.

Joseph A. Young is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse. His Black Novelist as White Racist (1989) is a study of the author who is both perpetrator and victim of a racialized myth. He currently teaches college writing and African American literature.