Black Boy's Comedy: Indestructibility and Anonymity in Autobiographical Self-Making

For my father

In his seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis, the French psychoanalyst and philosopher Jacques Lacan says that comedy, like tragedy, is a relationship between action and desire. While tragedy "functions in the direction of a triumph of death" (Ethics 313) and while its action is toward death, an end game of sorts, comedy, Lacan says, has to do less with a triumph of life over death and more with what he calls the flight of life. In comedy life flies, "slips away, runs off, escapes all those barriers that oppose it, including precisely those that are the most essential, those that are constituted by the agency of the signifier" (Ethics 314). So, while in a tragedy the hero submits to desire and to the signifier, dying in the process, in a comedy the action continues despite the encounter with the signifier and despite the disruption this encounter creates. In a comedy, this is to say, the hero is not a character defined by her mortality (as the tragic hero is), but an agent of the endurance of life (a kind of many-in-one), where life is understood as a process of generation, a line of derivation from one individual to another and so on, following life's seemingly inexhaustible chain of transformations.

What interests me most in Lacan's understanding of comedy is the indestructibility of the comic hero, his ability to escape all obstacles and to be renewed over and over again, since this figure resembles closely the self-restoring character we find in two different works whose main subject is autobiography—Richard Wright's Black Boy (American Hunger), the work that, arguably, defined African American autobiography for the twentieth century, and Paul de Man's seminal examination of autobiographical writing, "Autobiography as De-facement," which set the terms for subsequent treatments of this genre. My goal in this article is, first, to describe this figure and then to use it to understand autobiographical writing (in de Man's sense) and Wright's autobiography. What is pertinent for this article is, hence, not that psychoanalysis, black writing, and deconstruction, or the three authors, share some common or essential characteristics, but only that these specific works—Lacan's Ethics, de Man's "Autobiography as De-facement," and Wright's Black Boy (American Hunger)—make use of a similar figure, the indestructible, self-recreating hero, which will serve me to address certain aspects of autobiographical self-making.

Though the precise nature of the relation between Wright, Lacan, and de Man is not directly relevant for my essay, I should tentatively indicate that both circumstantial and substantive connections can be established between the three men and their work.¹ Circumstantial in that they draw upon some of the same phenomenological and existentialist post-Heideggerian philosophers and, of course, Freud.² Substantive, in that Wright's political and aesthetic project is, in its final logical consequences, a critique of the subject, as are Lacan's and de Man's.

Bearing in mind that Wright is one of the key post-Depression literary figures in the US, there is surprisingly little written on him.³ This is partly because Wright became a canonical figure before the canon wars (and, therefore, did not need to be rediscovered or reclaimed), and partly because there is something quite disturbing about his major novel Native Son⁴ and, perhaps less obviously, about his autobiography, which is still interpreted as if there were no substantial differences between the original version he wrote and the truncated 1945 Black Boy Wright published as a compromise.⁵ For these reasons, we have at least in some sense yet to encounter Wright and his work. That is, at any rate, what I assume to be the case in approaching his autobiography with Lacan and de Man, and in deciding to pursue the indestructible, self-restoring figure through Wright.

Part I: Lacan and de Man

In preparation...