Unmaking the male body: the politics of masculinity in 'The Long Dream.'
African American Review, Summer, 1999 by Jeffrey Geiger
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Less than a quarter of the way into Richard Wright's The Long Dream, readers are faced with the stark image of a lifeless body, and a passage which describes a man's torture and castration for transgressing the cultural taboo of miscegenation. Here Wright presents a narrative of pain so absolute that it would be far simpler to pass quickly over the description than to linger on it. But the novel bluntly renders the image of Chris Sims as he is laid out in the basement of Tyree Tucker's funeral home, where his body is "laid bare," "scrutinized," and "explored" during the performance of a makeshift autopsy. The incident is key to Wright's African American Bildungsroman, where the negative lesson of Chris Sims's body serves to deconstruct - or "unmake" - the evolving masculine identity of the novel's protagonist, Rex "Fishbelly" Tucker. For Wright, the black male body is the exemplary site of the contest, disruption, and emergence of African American identity in what might be called his highly personal vision of the South.(1)
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Richard Wright's 'The Long Dream' as racial and sexual discourse
African American Review, Summer, 1996 by Yoshinobu Hakutani
When The Long Dream, Wright's last novel, written in exile in France, appeared in 1958, two years before his death, it encountered largely negative reviews in America. Despite Wright's efforts to portray black people's bitter experiences in the deep South, as he had done so successfully in Uncle Tom's Children and Black Boy, The Long Dream, some readers felt, betrayed a distinct decline in his creative power. Saunders Redding, who had earlier detected a danger inherent in Wright's exile, observed that in The Long Dream Wright had "cut the emotional umbilical cord through which his art was fed, and all that remains for it to feed is the memory, fading, of righteous love and anger" (329). In "A Long Way from Home," Nick Aaron Ford, another black critic, concurred with Redding that Wright had lost touch with his native soil and the swiftly changing racial current in the United States (335-36). Agreeing with Redding and Ford, Maxwell Geismar remarked that, while Uncle Tom's Children, Native Son, and Black Boy are "solid, bitter, savage, almost terrifying fictional studies of the Negro mind," The Long Dream turns out to be "a surrealistic fantasy of paranoid and suicidal impulses, veiled in political terminology" (333).
Yet the lack of depth some critics deplored was appreciated as socially authentic by others. Such reviewers as Redding and Ford considered the novel merely repetitious of what Wright had shown before, whereas others deemed Wright's racial discourse as developing and continuing in relevance. Roi Ottley argued that the novel presents "a social document of unusual worth," depicting lynching, police brutality, and a race riot in a Southern town (327). Writing in Best Sellers, another reviewer found value in Wright's depiction of black characters as amoral and as "interested in practically nothing but irregular but frequent sexual relations," although this reviewer cautioned that Wright blames this idiosyncrasy of black people "on the white people" (Kiniery 332). Still another reader compared The Long Dream with Native Son for its direct treatment of race problems, as well as with well-established social novels like An American Tragedy and The Grapes of Wrath (Shapiro 334).
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