The Gaze of Langston Hughes: Subjectivity, Homoeroticism, and the Feminine in The Big Sea

What measures might be used to gauge the public voices of those belonging to marginalized and oppressed cultural groups? This question is raised with some urgency by Langston Hughes’s first autobiography, The Big Sea, for (in the words of Hughes’s premier biographer, Arnold Rampersad) “[i]n a genre defined by confession, Hughes appears to give nothing away of a personal nature.” ¹ Silences, subterfuge, dissemblance, and ambiguity remain enduring elements of self-presentation in African-American cultural practice, as Rampersad himself proposes: “The smiling poise of The Big Sea is, in fact, the poise of the blues, where laughter, art and the will to survive triumph at last over personal suffering.” ² But this solution, on close examination, offers only a partial explanation. One must also engage the broader terms of subjection Hughes faces and with which he negotiates in order to speak. In addition to culturally specific expressive traditions, one must examine other factors: biographical imperatives, historical contingencies, and the orthodoxies of a dominant cultural order which insistently “materialize” (in Judith Butler’s sense of the word) the speaking subject. ³ Reformulated, the question might run as follows: what specific silences allow Hughes to avoid breaching important orthodoxies so as to appear a recognizable rather than an untoward speaking subject?

The very famous opening image of The Big Sea is of Hughes on the deck of the S. S. Malone discarding his books into the Atlantic Ocean as the New York skyline recedes in the night. Having impulsively taken on the job of mess boy on board the freighter that morning, Hughes is bound for the West African coast and likens the discarding of his books to “throwing a million bricks out of [his] heart.” ⁴ Although the act suggests the tossing aside of masks and fetters in order to discover and reveal his genuine and as yet obscured “self,” the episode that follows is intensely ambiguous, rather than marked by the certainty of revelation.

Below deck, Hughes is faced with a gregarious cabin mate, “George[, who] lay stark naked in a lower bunk, talking and laughing and gaily waving his various appendages around” (4). As he inevitably speaks of women, the naked George boasts that once he returns to the United States he might pay the overdue rent he owes his landlady with “what he had in his hand” (4). The discourse of heterosexual braggadocio is invoked in circumstances that unmistakably belie heterosexual possibilities. The curious inaugural move of The Big Sea is from an expectation of certainty to an unresolvable moment of ambiguity realized in homoerotic terms, but couched in heterosexual boasting. At sea, in a cabin with only three laughing men, that any woman might receive “what [George] had in his hand” remains a dramatic impossibility. Starkly inadequate to an episode introducing sexual energy into a clearly all-male social space, George’s heterosexist discourse ironically highlights the contradictions governing gender/sexual prescriptives. Are there unnarrated reasons why George’s nudity and libidinal imaginings constitute one of the first recollections of the text? Does George, in fact, find someone in this all-male space to receive “what he had in his hand”? Readers are prompted to speculate about the sexuality of an autobiographer doggedly close-mouthed about his sexual encounters but who, on the second page of his narrative, gratuitously directs the gaze of his reader, through his own gaze, to the animated penis of another man and, furthermore, in this spectatorial act, to the discursive subordination of a female agent.

It is crucial to recognize that only female presence, not female subordination, is denied by the peculiar circumstances of Hughes’s arrival below deck; the disposition of the female agent in the boast remains as compelling an element of the episode as any questions raised about the sexual identity of Hughes or the two other men in the cabin. The discursive subordination of the female agent who holds legal and financial obligations over George’s “head” is a signal upshot of the boast. George attempts, by an appeal to the gendered dynamics of...