The art of politics and the politics of tragedy: A study on the influences of Stalinism upon literary form and critical interpretations of Richard Wright's 'Native Son' and Albert Camus' 'L'Etranger' (France)

Richard Wright and Albert Camus revived tragic form in their most popular works, Native Son (1940) and L'Etranger (1942) at a time when the spirit of a new age was coming to a close. In the Enlightenment tradition of Voltaire who used his "pen" as his "sword", each author responded to the important political questions of their day, concerning the betrayals of the goals of the Russian Revolution, by reviving the humanism of ancient Greek Tragedy. Just as Sophocles' Oedipus and Shakespeare's King Lear stirred their intended audiences, Wright's Bigger Thomas and Camus' Mersault appealed to men and women who once believed that they could stir the consciousness of a generation. The reemergence of tragedy and the birth of French Existentialism in the early forties reflects a changed social condition---a society moving away from the idea of social revolution. Yet, as Raymond Williams correctly observes, tragic forms are not a negative example to social manifestations, but a positive commentary on the potential for social revolution.; Although my main objective is for this dissertation to be a contribution to a renewed interest in Marxist literary criticism, trying to shed its Stalinist baggage in contemporary academic circles1, I will also bring in an unlikely critical bed partner, namely that of personal criticism, developed by Nancy K. Miller, in her well-known work, Getting Personal. In doing so, I will rely on my own lived experiences as well as those of Wright's and Camus' to help demonstrate my thesis. The Marxian equation, "life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life," suggests that the work of art has the potential to effect change at the material level of man's existence. Wright and Camus related their activities from the viewpoint of a real man or woman, yet, created characters, as did Shakespeare that overreached the idiosyncrasies of the individual, to achieve tragic proportions with one foot set firmly on the ground. Ultimately, they preserve the dialectic, at a time when many other writers were beating back a hasty retreat from what they believed was a hopelessly idealistic and unviable alternative---the possibility to transform the world from the bottom up.; 1See Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, (Cambridge, 1990) and Marxist Literary Theory , eds., Terry Eagleton and Drew Milne (Blackwell, 1996).