The Carnivalesque Grotesquerie in Richard Wright's Big Black Good Man

Abstract

This study proposes a Bakhtinian carnivalesque reading of Richard Wright’s story “Big Black Good Man.” In his investigation of the pre-historic epistemologies of the novelistic discourse, Mikhail Bakhtin mulls over the Rabelaisian grotesque delineations as being among the nascent manifestations of that discourse. The workings of the carnival dynamism in Wright’s piece is meant to question not only the genre frames, but also to playfully lay bare the violent hierarchies that characterize human expectations and ideational schemata. This “parodic” stylization on his part might amount to even being critical and self-critical burlesquing (caricaturing) that renders literature a discoursal spectacle of the space-racial imaginary. Wright’s story is replete with this carnivalesque tendency that dwells on meaning/power being negotiated and produced through the materiality and corporality of characterization and setting as well as plotting, making use of the geo-visual preconceptions and sensibilities. These sensibilities are here approached in the context of a carnivalesque-grotesque ecology.