Liquid Atmospheres: Richard Wright’s Poetics of Immersion in The Man Who Lived Underground.
Abstract
The increasing purchase that the concept of atmosphere has gained in academic discourse, and literary studies in particular, is mainly due to the two great theoretical advantages it affords. On the one hand, it allows to move beyond a strict subject-object dualism. On the other hand, it foregrounds a new understanding of aesthetics that is affective, bodily, and sensuous, thus shifting the focus from older aesthetic paradigms (e.g., a Kantian judgement of taste, issues and critiques of representation, etc.) to immersive experiences and their “presence effects” (Gumbrecht 2004). In my paper, I will problematize these assumptions by focusing on the understudied tensions between atmosphere and racialization in Richard Wright’s novel The Man Who Lived Underground. Characterized by a unique editorial history, the novel has traversed several socio- political and cultural climates, from its first draft in the early 1940s, to its 80 year-long circulation as a short story, before it was finally returned to its initial scope and structure in 2021. Drawing on Christina Sharpe’s notion of “weather” as the all-encompassing climate of antiblackness, I ask: What happens to the reconfiguration of the subject-object divide when the impersonal ambience and its affective density are predicated upon the objectification and fungibility of certain bodies? What are the risks, and what the potential, of framing literature as an immersive medium when the atmosphere we are plunged into, and that envelops us, turns liquid, septic, and unbreathable?
Employing a tale of literary naturalism as a framing device for a modernist, and specifically surrealistic, story of immersion, Wright’s novel foregrounds issues of sensory perception, weather conditions, presence and unreality. I argue that, by dramatizing the simultaneous existence of two distinct yet porous atmospheres, The Man Who Lived Underground offers us a poetics of immersion that conceptually anticipates and challenges the main tenets of its contemporary rhetoric.
Employing a tale of literary naturalism as a framing device for a modernist, and specifically surrealistic, story of immersion, Wright’s novel foregrounds issues of sensory perception, weather conditions, presence and unreality. I argue that, by dramatizing the simultaneous existence of two distinct yet porous atmospheres, The Man Who Lived Underground offers us a poetics of immersion that conceptually anticipates and challenges the main tenets of its contemporary rhetoric.
Date Issued
2025
Publication Type
Conference Item
Language(s)
en
Title of Event
Access(Rights)
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