"The soul has bandaged moments": reading the African American gothic in Wright's "big boy leaves home," Morrison's beloved, and Gomez's Gilda

African American Review, Winter, 2005 by Cedric Gael Bryant

When you go out to hunt monsters, take care that you do not become one. And when you look into the abyss, remember that the abyss looks back at you. --Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

The Soul has Bandaged moments-When too appalled to stir-She feels some ghastly Fright come up And stop to look at her-- --Emily Dickinson, #512

Alluding to Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe in his introduction to Native Son, Richard Wright invokes the American gothic tradition. Wright's "How 'Bigger' Was Born" concludes with the chilling announcement, "And if Poe were alive, he would not have to invent horror; horror would invent him." Native Son, with its invocation to James, Hawthorne, and Poe; its searing critique of the American Dream come-a-cropper; and the arrival of Bigger Thomas--like some rough beast out of Yeats's "Second Coming"--was an unprecedented literary and cultural event. Conjuring Poe is an act of repetition and revision, Wright seems to know, that acknowledges the literary significance of 19th-century gothic horror in American culture and its immeasurably more terrifying modern reality in the ordinary lives of contemporary Americans. Wright's use of the phrase "invent horror" ironically conveys the differences between 19th-century literary imagination and 20th-century social reality by implying that modern institutions exert far greater influence in socially constructing (or inventing) the horror of racism and economic determinism. The terror of the modern moment allowed Wright, as Joseph Bodziock puts it, "to bore into the white American psyche and find the anxieties and terrors that dwelled there. The American gothic replaced the social struggle of the European gothic with a Manichean struggle between the moral forces of personal community order and the howling wilderness of chaos and moral depravity" (33).

The 1938 publication of Wright's short story "Big Boy Leaves Home" and, later, Native Son in 1940, are benchmarks in the evolution of the African American gothic tradition that extends back to early 19th-century slave narratives and forward to Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) and Jewelle Gomez's The Gilda Stories (1991). (1) These writers and texts represent a significant Africanist presence--as producers of, and not simply as subjects in, the prevailing modes of gothic and grotesque narrative discourse in American literature and culture, a fact that has not been sufficiently explored. (2) "Big Boy Leaves Home" was the lead story in the collection Uncle Tom's Children. Later, when the collection was revised and reprinted in 1940, Wright added his polemical essay "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow," to preface the five stories comprising the volume. In each edition, "Big Boy Leaves Home" is pivotal in its narratological relation to both Wright's introductory essay and to the four other stories. Wright's story is a metonym for the cultural critique and narrative strategies that African American writers throughout the second half of the twentieth century develop and deploy through gothic discourse.

"Big Boy" is divided into five concise sections that begin with the combative but harmless verbal game of put-downs, or "signifying," that Buck, Bobo, Lester, and Big Boy play; it terminates with Big Boy hidden in a secret compartment beneath the driver's seat of a truck speeding northward. The primary sites of gothic intervention occur in sections two and four. The central events in section two analogize the "mirror stage," or gaze, in Jacques Lacan's construction of ego development (Clark 450). In Lacan's radical revision of Freud's early childhood stages of psychosexual development, the mirror stage marks the crucial period when the individual's nascent sense of self is "mirrored" or oriented in the intimidating presence of another who, in turn, elicits aggressive reactions of self-preservation in the self. Consequently, this period is one of intense anxiety in which the individual develops against the potentially dominating influence, or gaze, of powerful "others." Lacan's gaze, and the equally important forms of the gaze expressed in the passages from Nietzsche and Dickinson quoted above, form a central idea and motif in African American gothic literature.

"Big Boy Leaves Home" deploys the gaze to perform transgressive acts that dramatically critique the "ethics of living Jim Crow" and the gothic horror of resisting those "ethics." In section two, the "swimming hole" reserved for whites only demarcates a separate and unequal racial division and can be breached only by defiant movements through a construction of space that is physical, emotive, and ideational. To reach any of the three kinds of space, the boys must climb "over a barbed-wire fence and enter a stretch of thick woods" (23) delimited by the intimating sign "NO TRESPASSIN" (25). Once there, the swimming hole evokes both fear and desire in the teenagers, emotions that the "gothic," in Judith Halberstam's definition, produces in the reader. Emotionality forms a crucial part of a "technology of subjectivity," that "produces the deviant subjectivities opposite which the normal, the healthy, and the pure can be known. ... The production of fear in a literary text (as opposed to a cinematic text) emanates from a vertiginous excess of meaning.... Within Gothic novels ... multiple interpretations are embedded in the text and part of the experience of horror comes from the realization that meaning itself runs riot" (Halberstam 2, italics added).