Unmaking the male body: the politics of masculinity in 'The Long Dream.'

African American Review, Summer, 1999 by Jeffrey Geiger

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)

Before the doctor begins to narrate the autopsy, Wright describes Tyree and Fish - father and son - standing side-by-side, "gazing bleak-eyed at the body of Chris in a silence so agonizing that Fishbelly wanted to scream" (75). This painful silence seems to mirror the unspeakable and now-distant experience of Chris's pain. Yet Fish's desire to scream seems even further intensified due to the fact that the image of Chris's agony can elicit at best only inarticulate screams, not language. Elaine Scarry has offered one version of this relationship between language and acts of torture, focusing particularly on those cases in which pain is inflicted as a flagrant display of a regime's political authority. In The Body in Pain, she has suggested that "torture is such an extreme event that it seems inappropriate to generalize from it to anything else or from anything else to it. Its immorality is so absolute and the pain it brings so real that there is a reluctance to place it in conversation by the side of other subjects" (60). Rather than turn away from such "unspeakable" acts of violence, then, my investigation will turn its attention toward them, as Wright's work itself does, with the hope that, by directing the critical lens toward events elided from, and resistant to, conventional discourse, this analysis might itself suggest different ways of looking at the day-to-day construction of racial difference as threat, to which lynching has been an extreme response.

With Scarry's meditations on the phenomenology of the body in pain serving as a subtext, I hope to show that the silences and privations of language that accompany The Long Dream's most painful scene are grounded in a coherent theory of language under the physical and political pressure of pain. Lynching is an act that negates the signifying power of language, thereby erasing one of the formative features of identity: In doing so the torturers strive to fill the void left in the targeted community with their own dangerously unbalanced discourse of race and sexuality. Furthermore, by specifically targeting the visible physiological and cultural signs of gender and sexuality, lynching - in Wright's view - powerfully reconfigures the relationship of self to body for the African American male. The Long Dream, as a result, frequently demonstrates a peculiar slippage between traditionally fixed masculine and feminine roles, suggesting that Wright perceived deeper links between the development of African American masculine identity and the actual and psychic castration prominent in cases of lynching: a spectacle of white hysterical violence that targets not only black social autonomy but also the visible signifiers of masculine identity.

A body effaced, reduced to dust and thrown to the winds, a body destroyed piece by piece by the infinite power of the sovereign constituted not only the ideal, but the real limit of punishment. (Michel Foucault 50)

Scarry's discussion of human pain is immediately located in the political; not only is physical pain "unspeakable," but its very resistance to language serves to reinforce certain power inequalities: One cannot "speak out," or even "speak about," unutterable pain. The situation is not easily rectified: Overcoming this aporia is more complicated than merely developing "tact" or constructing a basic vocabulary for articulating pain, because the fact of "intense pain," as Scarry puts it, "is world destroying" (29). Pain is not only resistant to language, but actively destroys it. Pain forces an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to "the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned" (4). The victim of torture is thus subject to a repositioning of cultural meanings that are governed by language. Pain is channeled and reconverted into political power: The victim's familiar world is destroyed, while being simultaneously remade into an image of the dominant regime's political and cultural constructs.