The Genuflected Body of the Masochist in Richard Wright
In the spirit of E. P. Thompson’s celebrated essay “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” (1967), we will isolate three moments in Frederick Douglass’s Narrative, Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery, and Richard Wright’s Black Boy that convey a historical movement, a movement that we will then articulate in more detail.1 In the second chapter of his Narrative, after describing the sleeping conditions of the slaves, Douglass tells us that “they sleep till they are summoned to the field by the driver’s horn.” He points out that “Mr. Severe, the overseer, used to stand by the door of the quarter armed with a large hickory stick and heavy cowskin, ready to whip anyone” who does not respond promptly to the “sound of the horn” ( Douglass 1977: 31–35). In Up from Slavery, Washington (1986: 286) has high praise for the English, who impress him because “the home life of the English seems to me to be about as perfect as anything can be. Everything moves like clockwork.” In the second part of Wright’s Black Boy, the narrator works for a while at a medical research institute at a hospital in Chicago. Wright (1993b: 361–62) presents an apparently minor incident that takes place at his job. Some excerpts from the episode follow:
One summer morning, just as I began work, a young Jewish boy came to me with a stop watch in his hand. “Dr. —— wants me to time you when you clean a room,” he said. “We’re trying to make the institute more efficient.” Stripped to my waist, I slung the mop, moving steadily like a machine, hearing the Jewish boy press the button on the stop watch as I finished cleaning a room. “It took you seventeen minutes to clean that last room,” he said. “That ought to be the time for each room.” “You have seventeen rooms to clean, . . . seventeen times seventeen make four hours and forty-nine minutes.” He wrote upon a little pad. “After lunch, clean the five flights of stone stairs. I timed a boy who scrubbed one step and multiplied that time by the number of steps. You ought to be through at six.” Never had I felt so much the slave as when I scoured those stone steps each afternoon.
The “driver’s horn,” the “clockwork,” and the “boy’s stop watch” correspond to specific regimes of accumulation. The horn, clock, and stopwatch, increasingly sophisticated and finely calibrated chronometric devices, register the changed temporalities of capital accumulation.
The “driver’s horn,” augmented by the “hickory stick and heavy cowskin,” is emblematic of the instruments of punishment. In Up from Slavery, the “driver’s horn” has been replaced by “clockwork,” and Washington praises the regulation and hierarchy of the “home life,” a phrase that stands for the corporealization of discipline. The driver’s horn stands in a relation of exteriority to the slave object; clockwork, however, will have to be implanted in the body of the free subject. Implementing this program at Tuskegee, installing the clockwork into the “home life” of his students, Washington (1986: 171) insists that he wishes to impress his students “as their friend and adviser, and not as their overseer.” In Wright, the “driver’s horn” and the “clockwork” are replaced by the “stop watch.” This unassuming mechanical device induces, without physical coercion, a specific motor activity. It is the means by which a set of spatiotemporal coordinates is implanted in the body, which is then made to move “steadily like a machine.” This chronometric device also unwinds, more prosaically, in the computational syntax of the “Jewish boy”’s calculations: “Seventeen times seventeen makes four hours and forty-nine minutes.” This is not the spectacular figure of the overseer “armed with a large hickory stick and heavy cowskin” but the rather banal administrative figure of a boy with a stopwatch who even invokes the now all-too-familiar justification of economic exigency: “We’re trying to make the institute more efficient.”
The narrator observes that the boy was “stand[ing] over me while I was working and tim[ing] my movements with a stop watch” ( Wright 1993b: 370). This is not the spectacle of punishment; there is a different type of spectacle here, a scopic element in the vivid, chromatic display of the body as it is adjusted to chronometric time. The narrator, “stripped to [the] waist,” slinging “the mop,” scrubbing the steps “on [his] knees,” would hear “feet approaching,” the feet of “a white doctor or nurse” who would inevitably dirty the steps he is cleaning. Whatever we make of this everyday triviality, the intensity of the narrator’s humiliation is clear: “If I ever really hotly hated unthinking whites, it was then” (362). At this point, the text registers its place in an intertextual relation: “Never had I felt so much the slave as when I scoured those stone steps each afternoon.”
The shift from the spectacular to the scopic, from the personage of the overseer to the banality of a boy with a stopwatch, indicates a shift in the methods of supervision from “driving” to “timing.” The move from the spectacular to the banal indicates a modification in the modalities of power, the replacement, or attenuation, of agency by structure. Despite these permutations in the calculus of power relations, however, the narrators implicate themselves in a set of intertextual relations and morphologies of power—one by denying his role as “overseer,” the other by designating himself “the slave.” The strong embodiment of agency in the overseer is dispersed and distributed along the subject-object positions of a structure. The embodiment of the overseer is displaced by that of the boy with a stopwatch, but the shift from the spectacular to the scopic yields the subject-object positions of the narrator “stripped to [the] waist” and “on [his] knees” at the feet of “a white doctor or nurse.” While the embodiment of power is visibly weakened and no longer spectacular, the scopic element structures the subject-object positions chromatically.
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Notes
- These works were originally published in 1845, 1901, and 1945, respectively.