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

When you make progress out to hunt monsters, take care that you do not become individual And when you look into the abyss, remember that the abyss gazes back at you. --Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond useful and Evil

The inner man has Bandaged moments-When too appalled to stir-She perceive s some ghastly Fright come up And stop to gaze 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" closes 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 a certain quantity of rough beast out of Yeats's "Second Coming"--was an unprecedent literary and cultural circumstance Conjuring Poe is an act of repetition and revision, Wright present the appearances to know, that acknowledges the literary significance of 19th-century gothic horror in American agriculture and its immeasurably more terrifying novel reality in the ordinary lives of contemporary Americans. Wright's use of the phrase "invent horror" ironically carrys the differences between 19th-century literary imagination and 20th-century social reality through implying that modern institutions set to work far greater influence in socially constructing (or inventing) the horror of racism and economic determinism. The terror of the recent moment allowed Wright, as Joseph Bodziock sets it, "to bore into the white American psyche and find the anxieties and terrors that dwelled there. The American gothic replaced the social make an effort of the European gothic with a Manichean make an effort 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 stripling Leaves Home" and, later, Native Son in 1940 are benchmarks in the evolution of the African American gothic tradition that reach outs 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 body s represent a significant Africanist presence--as husbandmans of, and not simply as controls in, the prevailing modes of gothic and whim-sical narrative discourse in American literature and tillage a fact that has not been sufficiently explored. (2) "Big male child 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 whirl In each edition, "Big stripling Leaves Home" is pivotal in its narratological relation to one as well as the other 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 quite through the second half of the twentieth hundred develop and deploy through gothic discourse.

"Big Boy" is divided into five concise sections that begin with the combative on the other hand harmless verbal game of put-downs, or "signifying," that male Bobo, Lester, and Big lad play; it terminates with Big stripling hidden in a secret compartment beneath the driver's seat of a trade speeding northward. The primary sites of gothic intervention be found in sections two and four. The central occurrences in section two analogize the "mirror stage," or gaze, in Jacques Lacan's construction of conscious subject development (Clark 450). In Lacan's radical revision of Freud's early childhood stages of psychosexual exhibition the mirror stage marks the crucial period when the individual's nascent faculty of perception of self is "mirrored" or oriented in the intimidating nearness of another who, in turn round elicits aggressive reactions of self-preservation in the self Consequently this period is single of intense anxiety in which the individual disentangles against the potentially dominating influence, or gaze, of powerful "others." Lacan's gaze, and the equally important forms of the gaze press outed in the passages from Nietzsche and Dickinson quot above, form a central idea and motif in African American gothic literature.

"Big male child 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 sum of two units the "swimming hole" reserved for whites solitary demarcates a separate and unequal racial division and can be breached solitary by defiant movements through a construction of space that is physical, emotive, and ideational. To reach any of the three kinds of space, the lads must climb "over a barbed-wire palings and enter a stretch of thick woods" (23) delimited by dint of the intimating sign "NO TRESPASSIN" (25) one time there, the swimming hole summons both fear and desire in the teenagers, emotions that the "gothic," in Judith Halberstam's definition, bring into views in the reader. Emotionality forms a crucial part of a "technology of subjectivity," that "produce the deviant subjectivities opposite which the normal, the healthy, and the unstained can be known. ... The production of fear in a literary true copy (as opposed to a cinematic text) emanates from a vertiginous exces of meaning.... Within Gothic novels multiple interpretations are embedded in the true copy and part of the experience of horror advances from the realization that meaning itself move swiftlys riot" (Halberstam 2, italics added).