Can Bigger Thomas Speak: An Exploration of the Affective Space

In Richard Wright’s Native Son, Bigger Thomas faints at the inquest after his arrest. He only learns of his fainting by reading the newspaper titled “NEGRO RAPIST FAINTS AT INQUEST,” where he is grotesquely depicted as “a jungle beast” (Wright 260). The newspapers not only deprive Bigger of his subjectivity but also disseminate false and racist narratives about the crime such as the unfounded accusation of his rape of Mary, a white woman, despite his firm denial. Bigger’s reliance on newspapers demonstrates how he loses his subjectivity by experiencing life via the lens of others, and how he could not assert his voice in the public domain. Can Bigger Thomas speak? The novel’s ending suggests that Boris Max’s representation of Bigger in court fails to capture the complexity of Bigger’s marginalized experience, silencing him in front of the judge and the public. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak argues that “the subaltern cannot speak” because speaking for, or representing, the oppressed subjects always “leads to an essentialist, utopian politics” (Spivak 71, 104). In other words, the representation of the subaltern would inevitably result in a distortion and homogenization of the subaltern’s interests and voice. In his attempt to universalize Bigger’s experience as an epitome of Black oppression in America, Max neglects the intersectional experience of Black women like Bessie and reduces Bigger’s bond with Bessie to mere “physical elation” (Wright 368). Bigger remains unheard by society because the structure of language prevents him from voicing himself and being heard. However, Wright’s detailed depictions of Bigger’s inner psychological development and affective reaction complicate the question of subjectivity. By engaging with his fantasy and touching the texture of his affects, Bigger transforms from watching the sky as a passive spectator to envisioning himself in the fantasy as an active participant, which illuminates Bigger’s subjectivity outside of the structure of language.

The Failure of Conversation and Representation: 

Bigger’s first encounter with Mary and Mary’s boyfriend Jan Erlone, both open Communists, exemplifies how the supporters of the Communist Party arrogantly and blindly contradict the fundamental idea of equality that they claim to espouse. Attempting to speak to Bigger as if to a peer, Jan ironically commands Bigger not to call him sir: “‘First of all,’ […] don’t say sir to me. I’ll call you Bigger and you’ll cal me Jan. That’s the way it’ll be between us” (Wright 67). Jan’s tone already indicates the unequal power in their relationship. The negative imperative sentence illustrates that what Jan says to Bigger is not far removed from a White supremacist’s dismissal of Bigger’s thoughts and feelings. Furthermore, as Bigger becomes cluelessly confused and embarrassed by Jan’s “effort” to establish equality, Mary’s laugh engenders Bigger’s “dumb, cold, and inarticulate hate” (68). The contrast between Mary’s casual laugh and Bigger’s still, awkward position illustrates her insensitivity to the structural imbalance of power between Black employees and White employers, revealing that Mary is only interested in the nominal pursuit of equality. 

Jan, similar to Mary, lectures Bigger on Communism instead of having an equal and open conversation: “Don’t you think if we got together we could stop things like that?” “I really want you to read ’em, now. We’ll have a talk’ bout ’em in a coupla day” (75, 80). What Jan really aims to achieve in his interaction with Bigger is the conversion of Bigger rather than a conversation with Bigger. The supposed intersubjective experience of conversation is replaced by a destructive process of conversion. As political theorist Achille Mbembe contemplates the differences between conversion and conversation, he suggests that: 

[…] the act of conversion is also involved in the destruction of worlds. To convert the other is to incite him or her to give up what she or he believed. […] it is implicit that the act of conversion should be accompanied by the abandonment of familiar landmarks, cultural and symbolic. This act means, therefore, stripping down to the skin. (Mbembe 228)

Therefore, Jan’s attempt to convert Bigger is an attempt to reinforce the hegemony of racism and classism by obliterating Bigger’s personhood, history, culture, and subjectivity. During his time with Jan and Mary, Bigger constantly feels “naked” and “transparent” with a “badge of shame” attached to his skin color (Wright 67, 68). The violent act of conversion strips Bigger naked to force him to face the differences of power determined by their skin colors. More importantly, he does “not know where that fear and shame had come from” (108). As Eve Sedgwick contends, “only a scene that offers you enjoyment or engages your interest can make you blush,” shame is a complex affective with a mix of positive and negative feelings (Sedgwick 116). Bigger’s unidentified “badge of shame” does not only refer to his subaltern status as a Black chauffeur but also suggests a hidden, unconscious depth of pride and resistance in his black identity — his unconscious yet sensitively analytical lens of racism. For instance, before entering the Daltons’ house, Bigger raises the question of whether the Daltons “expect him to come in the front way or back,” facing the dilemma of being mistaken as a robber by the police or seen as rude by the Daltons (Wright 45). Bigger, of course, “gr[ows] angry” as he thinks about this spatial dilemma (46). Though Wright does not specify what Bigger is angry at, his anger is the proof of his limited yet insightful awareness of the unjust practice of redlining and its detrimental result to the Black population. Despite Jan and Mary’s passionate yet empty claim to dismantle social hierarchies in America, their ability to sense the operation of racial hierarchies is much slower and more blunt than Bigger’s firsthand and affective experience of racism. The mixture of his unconscious, positive pride of being Black and the subordination of his identity before Jan and Mary engenders the effect of shame. 

On one hand, there are intellectuals like Jan who assert the violence of conversion to divest Bigger of the opportunity to speak for himself, but on the other hand, there are plausibly reliable proxies like Max who reduces the heterogeneity of the Black subalternity to a coherent concept of homogenized oppression. In attempting to demonstrate the structural and systemic aspects of racial hegemony and argue for a more lenient sentencing, Max urges the judge to “[m]ultiply Bigger Thomas twelve million times” and “see [black people] as a whole” instead of individuals (Wright 364). The motive for the collective and homogenized view of the Black population is rather clear in this scenario: Max is strategically indicating the systemic racist culture that shapes the tragedy of the two murders to underscore the futility of simply sentencing Bigger to death. However, theorists of the subaltern studies are cautious about this coherent and collectivist narrative of subalternity, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak argues that the “subaltern subject is irretrievably heterogeneous” (Spivak 79). In other words, it is not enough to merely elaborate the structure of racism and power because the effective subversion of the hierarchies of power requires the destabilization of the subaltern identity. For example, Bessie’s intersectional experience as a Black woman is completely unremarked in Max’s speech, yet she is supposed to be included in the twelve million times multiplication of Bigger Thomas. The lack of a Black feminine voice in Max’s speech is what Spivak calls “epistemic violence” which is a form of violence inflicted through the disqualification of the subaltern’s knowledge and speech (76). Only we as readers hear from Bessie’s point of view in Wright’s writing, as her speech is dismissed by other characters in the novel. This potentially suggests that literature is a space where the subaltern could speak. 

In no way is Bessie a multiplication of Bigger. As a Black woman, she experiences the compounding effect of racism and sexism, yet Bigger changes from a victim of racism to a patriarchal victimizer when he rapes Bessie. The change of Bigger’s subalternity in relation to Bessie, accentuating the instability of the subaltern identity, illustrates that blind homogenization of the incoherent Black population would only perpetuate “epistemic violence” against Black women like Bessie. Furthermore, when Bigger sees other Black people on the street, he “fe[els] there was too much difference between him and them to allow for a common binding and a common life” (Wright 109). The differences among Black people perceived by Bigger are exactly what Max, as a proxy who is supposed to speak for the subaltern, fails to capture. Though Bigger does not have the academic language for his subalternity, Wright seems to suggest that Bigger has a critical view of the subaltern status through his lived experience, yet no one can hear Bigger’s insightful thoughts. 

Not only does Max’s totalization of the Black population silence the incoherent and diverse voices among Black people, but also his articulation of Bigger’s relationship with Bessie completely distorts their connection by claiming that “[sex] is all [Bigger] had with [Bessie]” (Wright 368). Emphasizing Bigger and Bessie’s inability to love in a racist society and reducing their connection to mere “physical elation,” Max attempts to elucidate the structural oppression of Black people at the cost of distorting and misrepresenting their truth (368). The erotic intimacies between Bigger and Bessie are beyond the sole purpose of sex because Bessie’s care for and bond with Bigger open up his inner space by instrumenting him to swallow and increase his appetite. My goal here is not to overly romanticize Bigger and Bessie’s relationship, as  Bessie’s death is the visceral and poignant proof of the complexities of their intimacies. What I am arguing is that Bigger’s affection for Bessie is much more than just sex and “physical elation” as Max believes. Throughout the novel, Bigger always has issues with swallowing, choking, and eating: Bigger has “difficulty in swallowing” and “wash[es] [food] down with swallows of hot coffee” at the Daltons because he has “no appetite”; Bigger feels “a sense of the deep, choking hate that had been his life” and constantly experiences a “hot choking sensation […] of his stomach and throat” (117, 176, 286, 341). The difficulty in swallowing and the constant sense of choking Bigger experiences can be understood as the results of racial melancholia. According to Sigmund Freud, the melancholic refuses the substitution of the lost object and “wishes to incorporate this object to itself […] by devouring it” (Freud qtd. in Cheng 8). In a sense, the melancholic “eats the lost object” and internalizes the “feelings of guilt, rage, and punishment” originally attached to the lost object, thereby engendering a difficult and thwarted process of swallowing (Cheng 8). 

So what is Bigger’s lost object that causes his melancholic choking? One of the answers lies in Bigger’s fantasy about white women. While distancing himself from the racist representation of Black men and women in Trader Horn, Bigger is “filled with a sense of excitement about his new job” at the Daltons as he imagines himself to be the white lover who has a clandestine affair with the white woman in The Gay Woman (Wright 33). The discriminative depiction between Black women and white women on screen shows a racialized process of generating desire. From Bigger and Max’s conversation in prison, we know how he is always expected to “feel more attraction for Mary than for the women of [his] own race,” yet it is not true for Bigger (326). On one hand, the racist society compels Bigger to generate sexual desire for white women via constructing a hegemonic discourse about Black men’s sexuality, while  on the other hand, society punishes and regulates Black men’s sexual desire for white women—constituting the lost object as Bigger realizes that he could never achieve what he is taught to desire by society. Contrasting with Bigger’s positive, sexual imagination of Mr. Dalton’s daughter in the movie theater, the bodily interaction with Mary in reality only instigates his “inarticulate hate” and “frozen” “fear” because he is always anxious about the punishment for a Black man desiring a white woman (81). Though Mary is drunk and almost unconscious that night, Wright portrays the scene with Mary’s face “[coming] toward [Bigger] and her lips touch[ing] his, like something he had imagined,” and Bigger describes his action as “another man step[ping] inside of [his] skin and start[ing] acting for [him]” (84, 326). Bigger’s passivity in the scene juxtaposes with his active imagination: there is no subjectivity for Bigger when the fantasy of sleeping with white women turns into an abhorred and tragic reality. How the racist values in society construct the narrative of Black men’s sexuality ultimately motivates Bigger’s kiss and physical touch with Mary instead of his true desire. In realizing the sexual fantasy, he becomes immersed in more fear and anxiety instead of agency. 

In court, Max frames Bigger’s relationship with Bessie as another connection that he is forced to establish rather than his genuine affection: “He had to have a girl, so he had Bessie. But he did not love her” (368). Wright again creates a slippage in Max’s representation of Bigger by detailing Bigger’s intense affective response to a glass of warm milk offered to him by Bessie. Bessie’s milk, or the imagination of her milk, alleviates his choking suffocation and engenders his increasing appetite for desiring and hoping, turning this pathological melancholia into a recoverable mourning. Instead of whiskey, Bessie offers a glass of hot milk to Bigger to calm him down (212). As he is running away from the police, Bigger keeps thinking about her glass of warm milk and then “[feels] in his hunger a deep sense of duty, as powerful as the urge to breathe, as intimate as the beat of his heart,” which prompts him to shout to the sky: “I’m hungry!” (232). When the police officer gives him a glass of milk, Bigger immediately thinks of Bessie’s milk and “his stomach growl[s]” (258). Different from the passivity and the sense of choking that Bigger experiences with Mary, Bessie’s care for Bigger engenders an open, expanding space for him to experience subjectivity and agency. Instead of fixating on the lost object and rejecting its substitution, this gluttonous appetite demonstrates an active, ever-changing reconfiguration of desiring and being desired. Put differently, Bigger is not the melancholic subject anymore when he actively generates his own desire. Bigger and Bessie have a limited intersubjective experience through which Bessie accompanies and forms a part of Bigger’s subjectivity, yet it is limited because Bigger could not truly understand Bessie’s intersectional experience and her voice in the novel. Nevertheless, because Max is speaking for Bigger, the judge and the public would never hear this intersubjective experience between them and never see Bigger’s deep bond with Bessie beyond sex. 

The Limitations of Language and the Affective Subjectivity: 

Spivak uses the experience of Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri, a subaltern Indian woman who committed suicide as a way to speak and voice herself, as an example to indicate that the subaltern speaks but the dominant groups cannot hear her words (Spivak 103). Because literature explores the often overlooked domain of the inner psychological development of the subaltern, we are able to see or  hear how in his thoughts Bigger aspires and attempts to speak for himself and gain agency via the patriarchal language in Wright’s meticulous descriptions of Bigger’s thoughts. While Bessie’s intersectional experience as a Black woman underlines the compounding exploitation of racism and patriarchy, Bigger’s resort to violence illustrates a different form of intersectionality in which he is thwarted as Black in his desire to achieve agency, but sees some potential as a man to demonstrate his power via physical violence. For Bigger, the violence against Gus is a “transfer[ence] [of] his fear of the whites to Gus” in order to mask the internal insecurities about his race (Wright 28). When Bigger beats up Gus at Doc’s, he physically coerces Gus into “lick[ing] [the blade of his knife]” as he “tingl[es] with elation” and has “lips twisted in a crooked smile” (40, 41). With the knife functioning as a phallic sign, the scene depicts both how sadistic violence is the basis of Bigger’s conceptualization of manhood and how ironically and paradoxically this view of manhood is homoerotic, therefore emasculating from a heteropatriarchal perspective. The release of violent desire only gives Bigger an ephemeral moment of agency as he quickly falls into a lonely, “depressed” state and inattentively “laugh[s] so hard [he] crie[s]” (43). Hence, hoping to achieve agency via manhood is always a fiction for Bigger as long as he perceives the world via the hierarchical lens of patriarchy.

Most importantly, Bigger’s attachment to his gun suggests the failure of the patriarchal language as an effective site for his subjectivity. When Bigger plans to rob Blum, he “feel[s] safer with a gun” though he does not need it; as he flees from the police, he “want[s] a gun in [his] hand” and “[gets] his gun from his pocket” while reading the newspaper report on the murder (Wright 33, 228). The gun is a phallic object that seemingly empowers him and ostensibly protects him from racist oppression. After killing Mary, Bigger admits to himself that “what his knife and gun had once meant to him, his knowledge of having secretly murdered Mary now meant” (Wright 141). The “empowerment” that comes from the violence against women becomes synonymous with that from the violence of the gun. Hence, what the gun ultimately signifies is the language of patriarchy. Though Mary is white, it would be naive to paper over the complex intersectionality between gender and race here. The violence against Mary is not simply a discourse about race in which the Black man challenges the white domination, but it is also about gender, in which a man murders a woman. Bigger’s attachment to this patriarchal language is also what prevents him from empathizing with Bessie and having a full intersubjective experience with her. 

The sense of agency that Bigger feels from touching the gun is an illusion. When he is under the siege of the police, he “clutch[es] his gun, defiant, unafraid”; however, while facing the water hose and the siege, he could not hold his gun anymore, therefore eventually throwing it away, yet the police could not imagine Bigger without a gun and keep commanding him to “throw that gun down” (Wright 251, 252). Overpowered by a larger, more phallic gun—the water hose from the fire department—Bigger yields to the police. The arrest of Bigger conveys how the patriarchal language maintains a hierarchy of power and views him as a subordinate and outsider in this structure, which shatters the fiction of agency that he feels about the murders of Mary and Bessie. There will always be more dominant men to overpower Bigger. Moreover, Bigger could not effectively speak for himself through this patriarchal language as no police could see or believe that Bigger was throwing away his gun. Instead, the racist, patriarchal structure paranoidly depicts him as always dangerous and violent, thereby legitimizing the othering of Bigger. He is always guilty before proven innocent, or there might be no chance to prove his innocence at all. 

When the language of patriarchy offers no space for Bigger to speak and be heard, I suggest that we should pay attention to how Bigger achieves an affective subjectivity through touching his feelings, therefore speaking for himself in the affective domain. To examine Bigger’s affective response, we turn to the religious conversion at the end of the novel in contrast with the Communist conversion at the beginning. Reverend Hammond visits Bigger in prison to conduct a religious conversion of Bigger, like Jan’s Communist conversion of him, and Bigger has been rejecting this conversion all his life as he “had killed within himself the preacher’s haunting picture of life even before he had killed Mary” (Wright 264). The religious conversion is as violent and destructive as the Communist one—when Bigger expresses the insistence on his hatred of the white people by not answering Hammond’s questions, Hammond chooses to convert Bigger’s thoughts and negate his feelings. However, different from Bigger’s rejection of Jan’s Communist conversion, that of the religious conversion enables Bigger to finally touch his feelings. With the Cross “hung next to the skin of [his] chest” given by Hammond, Bigger “feel[s] the words of the preacher, feel[s] that life was flesh nailed to the world, a longing spirit imprisoned in the days of the earth” (Wright 266). The touch engendered by the Cross becomes an excruciating sense of pain that “touch[es] his chest, like a knife pointed at his heart” as Bigger watches the burning of the Cross as a sign of the Ku Klux Klan on the street (Wright 313). The quick shift of the meaning of the Cross from a religious strength for Black people to the visceral violence against them, which is similar to how the gun for Bigger changes from a sign of patriarchal power to a sign of danger and violence in Black men, emphasizes the limitation and instability of signs in the system of language. The knowledge of and participation in the system of language does not transgress the hegemony of racism, classism, and sexism because the cultural meanings embedded in these empty signifiers are always determined by the dominant groups in society and are very difficult for the subaltern to subvert (though I would say it does happen sometimes). 

Bigger turns the violence of conversion into an affective experience in which he finds subjectivity. The scene with the Cross is important because the detailed description of Bigger’s affective response to the touch opens a new realm of affective subjectivity in which Bigger gains his agency. Wright seems to tell us that how the subaltern speaks is through affects, rather than the epistemological understanding of language. Following the touch of the Cross on his chest, Bigger “[is] trying to feel the texture of his own feelings, trying to tell what they meant” when he converses with Max (Wright 323). To “feel the texture of his own feelings” is to go on an affective journey of experiencing, as Eve Sedgwick argues that texture and affect are closely intertwined with each other because “both are irreducibly phenomenological” and non-monolithic (Sedgwick 21). We know how Bigger is always feeling his affects such as shame, fear, and anger, but Bigger does not learn to “feel the texture of his feelings” at the end of the novel. This moment of touch is an agential moment because “when we touch something or someone, we are, inevitably, touched in return,” which “links [the] inside and outside” (Bruno 19). Through touching his own feelings, Bigger establishes a mutual connection and communication with himself to replace the dualism of subject  v.s. object with an affective subjectivity that underscores his own agency. In this affective space, Bigger (inside) finally speaks his own thoughts and feelings, and Bigger (outside) can hear his words. Because affect can be autotelic—“affect arousal and reward are identical in the case of positive affects”—the affective space is less influenced by hegemonic values in the system of language (Tomkins qtd. in Sedgwick 19). As a sign in language has to signify certain meanings other than itself, a sign in the affective space could just be an empty sign to touch, feel, and experience. Hence, the subaltern speaks through affects.

At the beginning of the novel, Bigger looks at the sky with Gus and wishes that he “could fly a plane if he had a chance” (Wright 20). Wright continues the metaphor of the sky throughout the novel but adds some details regarding  its texture at the end: when Bigger fantasizes about the “black gulf between him and the world: warm red blood here and cold blue sky there,” “his eyes held the red blood of his body” (383). Besides knowing the texture of Bigger’s body and the sky, we also see his shift of perspective from only looking at the sky and the movie screen as a spectator to looking at and feeling the experience of his own body as a participant. This shift indicates how Bigger ultimately  breaks the surface of his skin and establishes an intimate connection with himself, gaining subjectivity because the supposedly free sky, a fantasy constructed by racism, is ironically a domain of restriction and suffocation for Black people. By not looking at the sky, Bigger rejects conversion to any form of fantasy constructed by the hegemonic values. He transforms from a passive viewer who is taught and expected to be ‘the violent Black man’, ‘the sexual Black man’, and ‘the ignorant Black man’, etc. in society to an active voyager who has the subjectivity to explore his own journey by turning to the potentially limitless inward world of his own (though it happens at the cost of his life). This change of perspective also prompts him to share all his genuine feelings with Max even though Max’s eyes are “full of terror” and interrupts him multiple times (Wright 392). Bigger “ha[s] to make Max understand how he saw things now,” and he eloquently conveys that “what [he] killed for, [he] [is]” (Wright 391, 392). This speech not only shows how the subaltern speaks by touching his own feelings, but also demonstrates how the subaltern forms his subjectivity via a complex process of understanding his own experience and positionality through affects. Referring to Jan as “Jan” instead of Mister or Sir at the end of the novel underscores how this formation of subjectivity gives Bigger a sense of agency to view himself as Jan’s equal. I am not romanticizing the tragedy of Mary, Bessie, and Bigger, because Bigger forms his subjectivity at the end of the narrative. However, I believe Wright raises a more important question in his writing: At what cost does Bigger achieve his subjectivity? How could people make this world better so that marginalized people could achieve subjectivity and agency without the cost of others’ lives? The legal system fails to become a site of agency because the politics of representation could not account for the incoherent complexities in marginalized groups. Maybe one of the answers is to touch our inner feelings as marginalized subjects and to feel how our marginalized experience turns into a nuanced richness and humanness.