A few years after Doris Lessing’s wrote the Grass is Singing, Richard Wright releases yet one of the most compelling novel the depicts the story of an African American fugitive slave—The Man in the Underground (1945). In this novel, the lead character, Fred Daniels attempts to escape from a corrupt history and a corrupt society. From a privileged house servant, Fred Daniels character develops into an underground criminal. In the course of Daniel’s journey, Wright reveals a layer of racism above ground. This novel is also quite similar to Ralph Elison’s Invisible Man. However, Wright argues more about slavery in times of modernity, racism, and alienation.
Wright liberates Fred Daniels from the aboveground control and decided his main character to build underground discoveries such that these discoveries will be known to the aboveground. Daniels’ intuition of his connection to the sewer made him decide to go underground. The sewer summons Daniels’: “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.” As he goes down to the manhole and into the sewer he descends into the darkness until he lets his body falls. After Daniels falls down and hit the bottom “his head was battered against the wall and he wondered if this were death.” When Daniels discovered his pre-consciousness underground, this signifies that African Americans devise a defense mechanism such as masking and avoiding the reality to achieve self-expression, freedom and self-fulfilment (Young, Cappetti).
There is a 360 degrees full swing of reversing the situation involving Western stigmatization of blackness (Fisher). For Daniels, blackness allows him to see, understand and suspend, cross that part of reality that is free from the underground. The cave or the sewer makes Daniels clever in sensing rhythms that the aboveground compelled him to suppress. For instance, upon hearing somebody singing “Jesus take me to your home above,” he attempts to find whose church it is without being observed, then “he was startled to see a bright sliver of light slicing the darkness like the blade of a razor.” When Daniels saw a congregation of black in white robes “his first impulse was to laugh, but he checked himself.” This light that is slicing the darkness signifies Manichaean Christianity penetrating his fellow blacks’ consciousness and distorting their very concept of self. Manichaeism encourages the black to ascend to a liminal assimilation of hegemony thereby submitting to the dualities of Western religion—the good and evil. Daniel’s initial impulse to laugh emanates from the fact that there is a desire among his black congregation to become whites and to be transported to the aboveground (Young).
Daniels defies the above ground so much so that it made him feel that “those people should stand unrepentant and yield no quarter in singing and praying.” The baby that Fred Daniels found floating dead in the sewer signifies the negated existence that the aboveground imposes on others. Upon seeing the dead baby he felt the same feeling of apathy and emptiness that he felt while seeing his black congregation singing in the church. Much as he struggles to suspend this reality that he sees in the above ground, he realized that “the baby’s eyes were close as though in sleep; the fists were clenched as though in protest.” Although he does not completely realize the essence of an object, his intuition marks his quest for the understanding of the natural or the naïve perception that is present in his pre-consciousness (Young).
The underground represents the many layers of Daniels consciousness. As Daniels probe through the underground he discovers the death and social paralysis of the society. The odor of the fluid from an embalmed cadaver and the blinding sight of light that leaves him defenseless for a moment reflect a vision of death “at once he know that he had been dimly aware of this odor in darkness, but the light had brought it sharply to his attention.” In this realization breaking away from the aboveground requires a huge effort. He must liberate himself from relying to his vision that carries the Manichaean reminder of his status aboveground. As he tunnels in the darkness before arriving at the funeral home, he realizes that his body or tactile perception besides his vision is the fundamental aspect of our perceptual experience. It is in this aspect that he encourages himself to discredit the sight of the cadaver (Young).
When Daniels further descended into the undertaker’s establishment, he discovered tools that symbolize a novel approach of seeing and understanding things that will be his armour in his struggle towards his subjectivity. As the novel progresses further, Daniels in influenced by a certain hegemony that will take part in shaping his identity. He is cuffed by the same desire in which “he had to tell the people of the church to stop singing.” It is also in this same event where Daniels experiences the same messianic illusion where “he stepped out upon 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 hands to touched them.” However, this delusion quickly ends because there is another evolving consciousness in the mind of Daniels. He eventually struggles into the concept of stealing and challenges to justify its attractions when he observed a shop employee steals money from the safe box. It is also the same money that people from the underground held into their hands. Daniel’s attempt to loot the diamonds and rings in the safe gave him a frightening feeling as he associated this darkness with the cadaver and the baby. At a certain point when Daniels forgot about counting his money at the time that he was setting up the light bulb to illuminate himself in the underground. “He had no desire to count the money; it was what it stood for—the various currents of life swirling above ground that captivated him.” The money is linked to several hegemonic ideologies that indicate that counting money is like struggling into the live wires of the aboveground culture instead of breaking away from it. All his loots influence his behaviour and how he looks at the whole world. Breaking away from the aboveground means that Daniels had to let go of his beliefs and forget his existence as a human being in order to give way to the creation of his new world. In the end, Daniels was very successful in his subversion of the aboveground hegemony because his understanding and consciousness liberated him from the existing ideological principles of the aboveground (Young).
Works Cited
Cappetti, C. "Black Orpheus: Richard Wright's "The Man Who Lived Underground"." MELUS, 26.4(2001): 41-68.
Fisher, R. R. "Symbolic Wrights: The Poetics of Being Underground." Obsidian, 11.2(2010): 14-42.
Young, J. A. "Phenomenology and Textual Power in Richard Wright's "The Man Who Lived Underground"." MELUS, 26.4(2001): 69-93.
