"A igger's place": lynching and specularity in Richard Wright's "Fire and Cloud" and 'Native Son.' - b

African American Review, Spring, 1999 by Miko Juhani Tuhkanen

"The disciplinarian power of race," Wiegman concludes, ". . . must be read as implicated in both specular and panoptic regimes"; "the black subject is disciplined in two powerful ways: by the threat of always being seen and by the specular scene" (39, 13).(5)

While representing this overlap, Wright's texts also suggest that certain strategies may be more effective than others as means of confinement and disenfranchisement. As I pointed out above, it is important that we do not make oversimplified statements about the "cruelty" or "humanity" of different uses of power which circumscribe and determine subjects to whom they are applied. Comparing the scene of Taylor's lynching to the one in which Bigger meets Mr. Dalton, one may feel uncomfortable in assuming that Taylor's position might somehow be preferable to Bigger's. To insist on such a reading, however, may be helpful in disrupting certain "commonsensical" assumptions about what constitutes a "more humane" way to exercise power. Also, Foucault advocates resistance in the face of any swift conclusions regarding the reasons behind the transition from a society of punishment to one of surveillance. According to him, the disappearance of the spectacle of physical torture in juridical systems of the West has been "attributed too readily and too emphatically to a process of 'humanization,' thus dispensing with the need for further analysis" (Foucault 7). A more attuned exploration, he writes, would try to uncover the processes whereby the new disciplinarian strategies could penetrate and determine the subjects' consciousness in an "economical" and productive way unrivaled by the strategies of spectacular punishment. As he concludes, the shift from punishment to panoptics attests not so much to "a new respect for the humanity of the condemned" as to "a tendency towards a more finely tuned justice, towards a closer penal mapping of the social body" (78). The aim was "to set up a new 'economy' of the power to punish, to assure its better distribution, . . . so that it should be distributed in homogenous circuits capable of operating everywhere, in a continuous way, down to the finest grain of the social body" (80).

The difference between power which seizes the criminal(ized) body and power which reaches for the "soul" (Foucault 16) may explain the different senses of agency which are attributed to Dan Taylor and Bigger Thomas, respectively, and the differing outcomes of Wright's two texts. Although Taylor's response to his beating is not one of violence, his ability to form a counter-strategy is readily identifiable as one of the unpredictable effects of the violent spectacle of punishment, which, according to Foucault, was one of the reasons behind the transition in penal justice. The staging of state-sanctioned violence invited repercussions in which those wielding the power were themselves threatened. Public execution, Foucault writes, "was . . . dangerous, in that it provided support for a confrontation between the violence of the king and the violence of the people It was as if the sovereign power did not see, in this emulation of atrocity, a challenge that it itself threw down and which might one day be taken up . . ." (73).