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Reading the blood: Violence, sacrifice, and narrative strategy in the novels of Toni Morrison
Hinson, Douglas Scot, Ph.D.
The Ohio State University, 1993
U-M-I 300 N. Zeeb Rd. Ann Arbor, MI 48106
READING THE BLOOD :
VIOLENCE, SACRIFICE, AND NARRATIVE STRATEGY
IN THE NOVELS OF TONI MORRISON
DISSERTATION
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for
the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate
School of The Ohio State University
By
D. Scot Hinson, B.A., M.A.
*****
THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY
1993
Dissertation Committee Approved by :
K. H. Burkman
D. A. Moddelmog A d v i s e r V. G. Lee Department of English To the angels, here and above.
X X ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My deepest appreciation goes to Dr. Katherine H.
Burkman, a mentor "exceeding wise and fair" and a steadfast friend. I also wish to express my most sincere appreciation to the other members of my advisory committe, Drs. Debra A. Moddelmog and Valerie G. Lee, for their guidance, support, and encouragement. Many thanks go to Dr. Martha Kubala and Dr. Molly Travis for graciously allowing me to draw on their work. I would also like to thank the
Department of English, the Graduate School, and the
College of Arts and Sciences for their support. Thanks also to all of my family and friends for their support and patience, and especially to Amy for her love and friendship.
IX X VITA
June 18, 1957 ...... Born--Charlotte, NC
1981...... BA, Ohio State University C o l u m b u s ,Ohio
1984 ...... MA, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, North Carolina
FIELDS OF STUDY
Major Field: English
Studies in Twentieth-Century American Literature
IV TABLE OF CONTENTS
DEDICATION ...... ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... iii
VITA ...... iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS ...... v
INTRODUCTION ...... 6
CHAPTER PAGE
I. NARRATIVE VIOLENCE AND THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED IN THE BLUEST E Y E ...... 31
II. THE OPEN WOUND: OPPRESSION AND NARRATIVE STRATEGY IN SULA...... 6 5
III. CHRONICLES OF DESIRE: MOVEMENT AND FLIGHT IN SONG OF SOLOMON ...... 118
IV. QUICKSAND AND CHOCOLATE : CULTURAL DISPLACEMENT AND NARRATIVE STRATEGY IN TARBA B Y ...... 170
V. "A NEW KIND OF WHITEFOLKS' JUNGLE: COMMUNITY AND NARRATIVE CRISIS IN BELOVED ...... 209
VI. CONCLUSION ...... 247
BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 267 INTRODUCTION
"A Slaughter Without the Blood": Violence, Community, and Narrative Structure in the Novels of Toni Morrison
From The Bluest Eye (1970) to Beloved (1987), Toni
Morrison's novels teem with violence— not even mothers and
fathers, sons and daughters, or cats and dogs are safe.
Morrison, who claims that "aggression is not as new to black
women as it is to white women," has written that "there's a
special kind of . . . violence in writings by black women— not bloody violence, but violence nonetheless. Love, in the
Western notion, is full of possession, distortion, and
corruption. It's a slaughter without the blood" (Black Women
Writers At Work 122, 123).
In Morrison's fiction, violence assumes many different
forms, from ostracism and psychological abuse to rape, from
self-mutilation to the most grisly murder. Morrison's earliest novel. The Bluest Eye, describes a father's rape of his daughter, the culmination of his long history of humiliation, psychological abuse, and neglect. Violence has
free rein in Morrison's Sula (1973)— from the "stubborn,"
"headless soldier" running with his brains sliding down his back to the collapse of the New River tunnel, "as ice split and earth shook" (Sula 8, 162). Song of Solomon (1977) is also shot through with violence, beginning with Robert
Smith's suicide and ending with the shooting of Pilate.
Psychological abuse and racial discrimination are as
prevalent in Tar Baby (1981) as is the physical violence in
the other novels. And, finally. Beloved 's violence sears
the pages and simmers just beneath the surface. The memory
of the psychological terrors and physical tortures endured by Sethe as a slave drive her to lovingly pull a jagged, rusty
saw blade across her infant daughter Beloved's neck.
Beloved's scars are the fruit born of the "tree" whip-carved into Sethe's back by her slavemaster.
Toni Morrison acknowledges that the secrets of violence
and its sources are safeguarded within the African-American communities she writes about. She claims that she chose the
first line of The Bluest Eye— "Quiet as it's kept"--for its
conspiratorial quality, for the phrase signified that
between "black women conversing with each other" at the back
gate, a "secret" was about to be shared, some "secret between
us and a secret that is being kept from us," a "conspiracy" both "held and withheld, exposed and sustained" (Tanner Lecture 21). The violent secret in The Bluest Eye, for
example, is the secret of "illicit, traumatic, incomprehensible sex coming to its dreadful fruition," and
the secret of a "pollution, . . . a skip, perhaps, in the
natural order of things" (Tanner Lecture 21). Morrison's
novels attempt a disclosure of the "secrets 'we' shared and
those withheld from us by ourselves and by the v/orld outside
the community" (Tanner Lecture 21).^ In her works, Morrison attempts both to share and to
hide the knowledge that the violence and disruption within the black communities she writes about are originally imposed
from outside by white oppressors, but eventually become self-
sustaining within those communities. However, when the
dominant white society victimizes blacks, they victimize each
other in response. Thus, white society's search for
scapegoats translates into a similar search within the black
community. In The Wretched of the Earth: The Handbook for
the Black Revolution that is Changing the Shape of the World,
Frantz Fanon describes how oppressed peoples, who have no other recourse, vent their frustration and anger on each other :
If this suppressed fury fails to find an outlet, it turns in a vacuum and devastates the oppressed creatures themselves. In order to free themselves they even massacre each other. The different tribes fight between themselves since they cannot face the real enemy— and you can count on colonial policy to keep up the rivalries; the man who raises his knife against his brother thinks that he has destroyed once and for all the detested image of their common degradation, even though these expiatory victims don't quench their thirst for blood. (Preface 18-19)
The communities in Morrison's novels deny their propensity to focus their anger and humiliation on the weaker members of their own communities. And, these communities repress and are unable to identify the violence— v;hite oppression— that is the root cause of the communities' collapse and entrapment in cycles of violence.^ Moreover, in an effort to improve their lot, members of black communities frequently forego traditional African and African-American values and adopt those of the dominant culture.
Nonetheless, despite their inability or reluctance to
identify the source of violent disruption, Morrison's novels are frequently concerned with the communities' attempts to purge violence and with their struggles to repair the bonds of the community torn apart by it, primarily by recapturing a traditional value system from the past, a value system characterized by tolerance and a lost sense of identity through the community. Morrison's works are devoted to showing how the violence and discord in her communities stem not only from the loss of those beliefs in the community, but also from the abandonment of those beliefs in favor of the beliefs and values of the dominant culture. Deborah Sitter makes a very useful observation when she notes that
"frequently in [Morrison's] later works, positive values are associated with specific practices of West African culture: naming traditions, ancestor worship, acceptance of the supernatural, harmony with nature, and the linking of individual wholeness with rootedness in a community" (19).
The value these novels place on traditional beliefs, especially vjholeness through community, is apparent in Morrison's positive treatment of characters like Pilate Dead, whose refusal to turn from her natural lifestyle and traditional values makes her the heroine of Song of Solomon.
Attempts to recover lost or abandoned belief systems
invariably involve a return to origins--both the origins of violence and the origins of the community and its values. 10
Consequently, Morrison's works labor to return to their
origins in order to reclaim the African origins of the
African-American communities and to return to the positive
African values whose loss now shatters the harmony of the
lives of her characters. But these works also return to the
more immediate origins of violence in the community, which
are often revealed through the characters's efforts to come to terms with their personal pasts. In Song of Solomon,
Milkman discovers himself and comes to a self-sacrificing
belief in the power of the community by returning to his
rural Southern and African past. In other instances, such as
in Beloved, Morrison's novels drive back to the origins of
African-American communities in America where the horrors of
Slavery pit members of the same communities against each other, creating conflicts that must be reckoned with before the community can find peace in the present. Those horrors
from the past constantly intrude on the text, dominating both
it and the lives of Beloved's characters, demanding that they be owned and set aside as part of the past.
In Violence and the Sacred, René Girard writes of communities embroiled in desire and reciprocal violence. In
Girard's terms, at the heart of the chaos in communities like those in Morrison's works is a destructive desire to possess that which another possesses— in Morrison's novels, underprivileged black communities desire the wealth, privilege, and status the dominant v/hite society possesses.
Girard terms this desire "mimetic" (145-49). Girard's theories emphasize that mimetic desire is not spontaneous; 11 one member of the community desires what another desires simply because another desires it: "in desiring an object the rival alerts the subject to the desirability of the object .
. . the rival, then, serves as a model for the subject"
(145). When one desires an object, his/her desire imbues the object with value in the eyes of the other. In Morrison's novels, black communities abandon their traditional values in favor of those of the dominant culture.
In Girard's schema, mimetic desire inevitably leads to conflict— "mimesis coupled with desire leads automatically to conflict"; conflict invariably leads to violence {Violence and the Sacred 14 6). The violence breeds more violence as members of the community seek revenge. In this way, the chain of reciprocal violence is forged.
Moreover, mimetic desire and cycles of reciprocal violence contribute to and are fueled by a breakdown of differences within the social order (Violence and the Sacred
49). Gender differences, differences in economic and social standing within the community, familial roles, and many other distinctions among members of the community help members of the community "maintain their 'identity,'" their particular place within the social structure: "'Degree' or gradus is the underlying principle of all order, natural and cultural. It permits individuals to find a place for themselves in society" {Violence and the Sacred 49-50) . Girard observes that the breakdown of difference sometimes manifests itself in "deliberate violations of established laws" and taboos, though he stresses that the loss of difference "must be 12 viewed in [the] broadest context" (Violence and the Sacred 119). Girard cites hierarchies within families and society overall, relationships between children and parents, and between servants and masters as examples of relationships affected by the crisis of difference. Moreover, once mimetic desire has a foothold and reciprocal violence has spread within the society, differences among members of the community evaporate as the members of the community become rivals for privilege and as they become both victims and perpetrators of violence. Girard writes, "negative reciprocity, although it brings people into opposition with each other, tends to make their conduct uniform and is responsible for the predominance of the same " (The Scapegoat
13-14) . The resulting chain of reciprocal violence can be terminated only through sacrifice, or "pure" violence.
Girard's theories of the breakdown of difference are useful for describing the fate of Morrison's communities.
Her novels often depict this breakdovm of differences in class, gender, social status, social roles, and ideological positions. To cite just two examples, when Cholly rapes
Pecola in The Bluest Eye, Pecola becomes not daughter, but victim. We must be reminded, however, that Cholly is himself a victim of oppression caught up in a chain of reciprocal violence. The inversion of roles that occurs for Sydney and Valerian Street in Tar Baby is another clear example the breakdown of difference— Sydney assumes Valerian's role of master; Valerian becomes his underling. Girard asserts that
"the antagonists caught up in the sacrificial crisis 13
invariably believe themselves separated by insurmountable
differences. In reality, however, these differences
gradually wear away. . . . As the crisis grows more acute,
the community members are transformed into 'twins,' matching images of violence" (Violence and the Sacred 78-79).
Girard's theories are also useful for understanding
Morrison's communities' propensity to vent their anger on
scapegoats. Girard describes a community's response to this
"overwhelming catastrophe": "its members instinctively seek
an immediate and violent cure for the onslaught of unbearable violence and strive desperately to convince themselves that all their ills are the fault of a lone individual who can easily be disposed of" (Violence and the Scared 80). Girard writes that
in the founding murder, the victim is held responsible for crisis; the victim polarizes the growing mimetic conflicts that tear the community apart; the victim breaks the vicious cycle of violence and becomes the single pole for what then becomes a unifying, mimetic ritual. (Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World 40)
Within the communities Girard describes, the guilt bred by rampant reciprocal violence is debilitating and must be expunged through sacrifice, an act of violence that is community-sanctioned and that reenacts the original act of violence. The scapegoat (sacrificial victim) functions to carry away the sins of the community and to suffer exile or death without the fear of retaliation. Because the scapegoat is in some way outside of the community (i.e., different from) and possesses no strong bonds with members of the 14 community, his/her death is not avenged; there is, simply, no one to avenge it {Violence and the Sacred 86).
Morrison's novels focus on communities entangled in mimetic desire. They desire what the dominant culture possesses— dominant position, power, privilege, wealth, and even "beauty." The frustration that results from striving for these unattainable desires manifests itself in violence.
Their inability to "have" material wealth, privilege, position, beauty, etc., like the white society creates in them a sense of worthlessness and inadequacy. This painful self-loathing causes them to lash out at each other. Rather than directing their anger at the appropriate target, the dominant white culture against whom they feel powerless, members of the community attack each other. The communities cannot hope to escape this chain of violence without addressing its root cause in oppression by the white society.
While violence in Girard's communities may arise within the communities themselves, without an oppressive force from outside, in Morrison's communities, tension and rivalry are instigated by a dominant group whose oppression creates conditions that promote violent rivalries within the oppressed society. However, as I have noted above, the community remains unconscious of the power of oppression to generate violence within the community itself.
Because originary violence within the community resembles a trauma that has been repressed and must be reenacted through sacrifice, the history of violence within the community is comparable to the process through which 15
Freud's analysands experience trauma, repress it, repeat it,
and finally work through it in the psychoanalytic process.
Patterns of behavior for the analysand continually "repeat"
the original trauma, though the analysand never recognizes
that behavior as a repetition of the trauma. As a result,
the present is dominated by repetitions of the past, and the
difference between time-present and time-past is effaced.
The analysand experiences the return of the repressed memory, perhaps even achieves awareness that the trauma is real in the past, yet never reexperiences or works through it
("Beyond the Pleasure Principle" 14 9). According to Freud, "we may say that the patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out. He reproduces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats
it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it"
("Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through" 150) .
The analysand can break free of the pattern of repetition only through reproducing or reenacting the trauma as opposed to simply repeating it; the analysand must reexperience the trauma and its concomitant anxiety. Freud notes that "the process has no curative effect if, by some peculiar chance, there is no development of emotion. It is apparently these emotional processes upon v/hich the illness of the patient and the restoration of health are dependent"
("The Origin of Psychoanalysis" 8).
A psychoanalytic narrative model is particularly appropriate and useful for a study of Morrison's works and for relating Morrison's thematic concerns to her narrative 16 strategy, for, as she writes in playing in the dark, "the narrative into which life seems to cast itself surfaces most forcefully in certain kinds of psychoanalysis ..." (Preface v ) . Peter Brooks has developed a theory of narrative dynamics which, for its emphasis on trauma, repetition, and the crisis of difference, resembles Girard's theory of violence and social dynamics within communities.
Brooks writes that "plot starts . . . from that moment at which story, or 'life,' is stimulated from quiescence into a state of narratability, into a tension, a kind of irritation which demands narration" (Reading for the Plot 103). Brooks asserts that traditional narrative begins with "an inactive collapsed metaphor and works through to a reactivated, transactive one, a metaphor with its difference restored through metonymic process" (Reading for the Plot 21) . The metonymic process Brooks describes depends on the substitution in a sequence of a series of metonymies for the totalizing metaphor of the novel, with each metonymy representing a repetition of the novel's metaphor. Together this sequence of metonymies constitutes the novel's plot
(Reading for the Plot 29). The meanings we derive from these metonymies are "provisional"--"what remains to be read will restructure the provisional meanings of the already read" (Reading for the Plot 23). In other words, the meaning of these incidents in the plot must be revised in relation to the end: "prior events, causes, are so only retrospectively, in a reading back from the end"(Reading for the Plot 29) . Those metonymies repeat some disruption of 17
order that incites the narratable. To name the cause of the
narrative would make the narrative itself unnecessary. As D.
A. Miller has written, narrative is not suited to the aims of
narrative (x). That is, the narratable begins with a
disruption of a natural order, begins when "quiescence" is
disturbed; simultaneously, the narrative seeks to return to a
state of equilibrium, and to defer that return to "normalcy"
(x). The narrative, though, must work through the trauma.
After all, "only insufficiencies, defaults, deferrals can be
'told'" (3). If the novel names at this point its roots in the disruption of the natural order and names the cause of that disruption, its purpose for existing is eliminated.
D. A. Miller writes that "the novel's whole reason for being
is to 'negate' the negativity that is its narrative"
(Narrative and Its Discontents 265-66) .
Moreover, Brooks suggests that
repetitions are . . . both returns to and returns of: for instance, returns to origins and returns of the repressed, moving us forward . . . toward elucidation, disillusion, and maturity by taking us back, as if in obsessive reminder that we cannot really move ahead until we have understood that still enigmatic past, yet ever pushing us forward, since revelation, tied to the past, belongs to the future. (Reading for the Plot 125)
Brooks refers to these returns of the repressed within the text as detours or deferrals of the forward-moving plot. The energies that serve to hold the plot together, to maintain it through deviance and detour, are the energies of the "textual hero's career" and the energy of the reader's desire for the end, or a return to quiescence (108) . He suggests that plots move in two directions at once, both forward through the 18 metonymic process and backward through repetitions that serve to return the narrative to its origins in an originary trauma. He summarizes his theory of narrative dynamics as it is derived from the "masterplot" of Freud as
a system of repetitions which are returns to and returns of, confounding the movement forward to the end with a movement back to origins, reversing meaning within the forward- moving time, serving to formalize the system of textual energies, offering the possibility (or the illusion) of "meaning" wrested from "life." {Reading for the Plot 296)
Brooks' theory of narrative dynamics and Girard's system of social dynamics depend on the repetition and reenactment of an original trauma, knowledge of which has been repressed.
In Girard's model, acts of reciprocal violence that repeat an originary act of violence (the original "trauma") are comparable to the returns of the repressed for the analysand in Freud's theory and to Brooks' repetition through metonymy of a totalizing metaphor.^ In each case, metonymies or substitutions are allied together by resemblance [and difference] to form plot, either the plot of the novel or the
"plot" of the history of violence within the community. The original act of violence might be said to be repeated in each instance of unsanctioned, reciprocal violence, just as incidents in the plot might be said to repeat an original trauma that instigated plot. Furthermore, in communities, each act of violence moves plot forward and backward; each is at once a detour, a return to the origins of violence within the community, the memory of which has been repressed, yet 19
each is also an act which moves the community forward toward the climax of the crisis.
The novel, Brooks writes, must actually describe the experience of the original trauma before it can achieve closure and return the narrative to order, or "the non- narratable. " Similarly, sacrifice in a Girardean sense releases the community from violence and the text from repetition and plot. In Girard's terms, to gain some control over violence and the guilt associated with that violence, and to restore equilibrium within the community, an act of unanimously sanctioned violence must take place: the sacrifice of the scapegoat. And, to restore the narrative to the non-narratable, there must be what Brooks has termed "reproduction" or reenactment {Reading for the Plot 124). For
Brooks, there must be a repetition with a difference within the plot if difference is to be restored within the narrative. Thus, sacrifice is the equivalent of reproduction, i.e., "enactment." In other words, reproduction and sacrifice name the trauma, incorporating the past as past within the present, to borrow Brooks' phrase, in both the community and the analysand's "texts."
In Morrison's novels, incidents within the plot metonymically repeat dominant white society's oppression of black communities. In her works, oppression by the white community must be named if the novel is to escape plot and the chain of metonymic repetitions. Just as the communities seek release from the violence that permeates them, so the texts, the narratives themselves, are concerned with "finding 20 a plot and losing it, . . .[with losing] the sense of plottedness around its hero, and his [her] eventual 'cure'
from plot" {Reading for the Plot 124). Like Morrison's narratives, her communities are concerned essentially with
finding a "cure" for violence; the sacrifices of scapegoats are an attempt to provide that "cure." The "sacrifice" of the scapegoat in many of Morrison's works constitutes an attempt to release the community from the chain of violence. Because the "sacrifice" is the narrative reenactment of the original trauma that generated the plot in the first place, from a narrative point of view the sacrifice releases the novel from repetition and restores difference within both the plot and the community. Sacrifice has been defined by Girard as the "reenactment of a 'prior event,'" and "the 'prior event' that all ritual killings rationalize and represent in various 'substitutions' is a collective murder, an act of mob violence" {Violent Origins
8). Repetition within the narrative is also an attempt to work through and gain control over an original trauma. Thus the narrative's attempts to return to the non-narratable resemble closely the community's attempts to end the violence in its midst. Both the community and the novel seek a return to order and to a reinstatement of the difference that has collapsed.
The difference within the narrative that reenactment and
"sacrifice" attempt to restore has primarily to do with the degree of sameness and difference among incidents within the plot. Narrative difference also has to do with time, with 21
the relative linearity or circularity of the movement of the plot. Within a recursive or circular plot, time present and
time past lose their distinction as time past is incorporated
into time present in the narrative. Morrison's narratives move forward, but are interrupted by episodes that disrupt a
linear, temporal pattern. Those disruptions of the forward moven.ent of the plot are examples of repetition and the
return of the repressed within the narrative structure.
Within these detours, characters recount their pasts; they
narrate the violence and trauma that have driven them to perpetuate violence in the community.
Morrison's narratives struggle to reinstate the difference between the present and the past, thus escaping compulsive repetition of the past in the present. Moreover, narrative difference also frequently involves the distinctions between narrative voices and the consciousnesses that are rendered in the texts. Often the identity of
Morrison's narrators becomes blurred, reflecting the crisis of difference within the text and within the novel's community. It is difference on these levels that is restored when an incident in the plot can be said to reenact originary violence.
Even though all of Morrison's work is immersed in violence, each novel treats violence in unique ways,
incorporating violence in a variety of forms and offering variations on the theme of the scapegoat and its function within the community. Like Morrison's later novels, her first novel. The Bluest Eye, is suffused with an inescapable 22
violence. This violence is motivated by a pervasive self-
loathing, an intolerable self-hatred that seeks expression in and expurgation through the sacrifice of a young girl, Pecola
Breedlove. In this novel, Morrison begins to define the long-term effects of economic oppression and explores the destructiveness of abandoning a traditional set of values in favor of the values of the dominant class. Even while
Morrison's first novel struggles unsuccessfully to name white violence toward blacks as the source of violence within black communities, it chronicles how a lack of community and solidarity, a sense of shared values and beliefs, has the power to disrupt and destroy the individual.
Morrison's second novel, Sula, is also permeated with brutal violence, yet that violence is often motivated by an intense, almost inhuman love. Just as Pecola becomes victim in The Bluest Eye, in this novel, all violence and anger seem aimed at a final "release" in Sula's sacrifice. Yet, as in
Morrison's other works, the sacrifice is not redemptive; after Sula's death, the community is worse off than it was. Sula is also concerned with preserving a sense of values, of refusing to participate in the cycles of reciprocal violence that are initiated by white oppression. Finally, Sula is concerned with the struggle to create an identity independent of the value system of the dominant society.
The violence in Song of Solomon, Morrison's third novel, is at once less subtle and less pervasive than it is in earlier works; nonetheless, violence remains as Morrison's unmistakable signature and the trademark of her communities. 23
Thus, when we turn to Song of Solomon, we are not surprised to find its pages spattered with the blood of community violence. Here, the familiar pattern of revenge and reciprocal violence emerges in stark outline with the introduction of the "Seven Days," a vigilante group of seven black men sworn to take the life of a white person for every black "murdered" by whites. Moreover, as it does in her other works, this violence within the society invariably leads to sacrifice. Still, though Morrison contends with the problem of values and violence within her communities, depicting the struggles of the community to discover or rediscover the values worthy of preservation and beneficial for survival. Song of Solomon offers no definite answer to the question of violence and discord within the community.
The psychological torment, child abuse, abandonment, and discrimination in Tar Baby are a subtle departure from the more physical violence in Morrison's earlier novels. Still, violence in this novel defines characters and focuses the action. For example. Valerian Street unmercifully tortures his wife, constantly berating and embarrassing her. Though
Valerian's abuse of his wife is not related, we discover that she is also guilty of physically abusing their infant son.
Once again, although Morrison depicts in Jadine and Son, characters who represent two sides of a cultural question, her novel only focuses the question more sharply without posing a definitive solution. Tar Baby moves much closer to naming the source of violence, yet it resists naming a way to overcome that violence. 24
In contrast to the violence in her earlier novels, in Beloved, violence is generally the by-product of slavery and oppression, i.e., it is violence visited on blacks by whites rather than violence within the black community itself.
Still, it does not strike us as unusual to find graphic violence in Morrison's Beloved. Nor does it surprise us to find in Beloved a community, once bonded through love and mutual respect, ripped apart by violence and envy. But violence infiltrates Beloved long before Sethe murders her daughter. Whippings, shootings, and other physical tortures dominate the scenes Paul D. and Sethe describe from their lives as slaves. Sethe murders her daughter to save her from these horrors of slavery. However, in Beloved, communities ripped apart by violence discover that they can survive only through a revival of communal values. Morrison returns to the origins of violence. Slavery, to understand and to depict how communities can overcome the devastation of oppression.
Here I will also show how the effects of and motivations for violence in Morrison's novels are as distinct in each case as her variations on a recursive, collapsing narrative strategy. Morrison's narrators in The Bluest Eye "tell" this novel through flashbacks, backward-looking stories within the forward-moving plot. However, in each case, the stories recount the characters' pasts, explain their motivations, and describe the inescapable and destructive cycles of self-hatred.
A different use of this narrative pattern emerges in
Sula. Here chapters are titled according to a particular 25
year, i.e., 1929, 1932, 1931, etc. However, those chapters
chronicle events from characters' pasts, events which take in
the place leading up to the title years. A curious recursive pattern emerges, the novel and the lives of its characters folding back over themselves, moving forward in fits and
starts. Taking two steps backward for every one step
forward, the novel jerks to its conclusion in spite of
"violent" interruptions. In a less obvious way, the
recursive narrative strategy, the dependence on "rememory" so
characteristic of Morrison, unfolds in Tar Baby. The novel opens with Son's attempts to struggle toward shore. He reaches shore but never escapes it. The metaphor of thwarted escape shapes character and plot in this novel. The turgid undertow of a violent, repressed past tries to pull the characters, and the forward-moving plot, under. It is these repetitions of a defining metaphor that generate plot and constitute the narratable.
Through its reliance on storytelling to develop character and advance the plot, the narrative strategy in all of Morrison's novels echoes the narrative element in the psychoanalytic process. However, the narrative pattern in
Beloved most closely resembles storytelling in the psychoanalytic process. Through storytelling, characters attempt ultimately to escape their pasts, to make sense of their pasts, or to transmit their legacies. Storytelling in
Beloved is among the most distinctive features of its narrative; it is more overt here, more performance events rather than mere flashbacks. Moreover, these performances 26 serve important functions. For example, the title character,
Beloved, subsists on her mother's stories, while her sister,
Denver, tries to hammer out her identity by retelling the story of her birth, a story her mother has told her many times before.
In an interview in Black Women Writers at Work, Morrison has this to say about the pariah relationships between African-American and dominant white society and within
African-American communities themselves:
. . . the civilization of black people that lives apart from but in juxtaposition to other civilizations is a pariah relationship. In face, the concept of the black in this country is almost always one of the pariah. But a community contains pariahs within it that are very useful for the conscience of that community. (129)
And in her fiction Morrison's project is to explore the relationship of the black community to the dominant culture and to examine how within that relationship, the dynamics of the black community work themselves out. Morrison's preoccupation with community and the value of positive
African traditions finds expression in her fiction, works that affirm what Sandi Russell asserts for Morrison and
African-Americans: "one has to have a sense of community" (43) . And, in Morrison's fiction, that sense of community is finally the key to the survival of African-American populations today. "The worst thing that can happen in a city," Morrison writes, "is that the ancestor becomes merely a parent or an adult and is thereby seen as a betrayer— one who has abandoned his traditional role of advisor with a strong connection to the past" ("City Limits, Village Values"
40) . As Sandi Russell points out, Morrison has "shown what 27
can happen to a person alienated from positive black traditions" (44). Indeed, Morrison devotes her fiction to understanding the impact of this abandonment of positive, traditional African values and beliefs. Finally, according to one of Girard's critics, "the best literature, in Girard's view, always opens the possibility of a 'tragedy of history,'
in which the reality of violence is revealed to human society" (Seibers 215). Morrison's fiction seeks to uncover the destructive effects of oppression, to reveal oppression's power to breed violence, and to expose that "tragedy of history" within the history of African-Americans. At the same time, Morrison celebrates the power of the community to triumph over violence and oppression. 28
NOTES
^ An examination of violence in Morrison's novels brings into focus problems already occupying Morrison critics— her depiction of the community, relationships among members of the community, and the function of the scapegoat. In short, understanding violence in Morrison tells us a great deal about the community and explains why blood seems to seep from the pages of her novels, blood which until now has sparked little critical interest. Recent criticism of Morrison's work often explores the community in her novels, yet rarely does it acknowledge the role violence plays in the community or directly identify violence as a distinguishing feature of those communities. Instead, critics have been preoccupied with Morrison's depictions of the community in general and, more specifically, with the relationship of the individual to her/his community. For example, 0'Shaughnessy suggests in "'life, life, life, life': The Community as Chorus in Song of Solomon," that critical treatment of the community in Morrison's works deals primarily with "the author's preoccupation with the effect of the community on the individual's achievement and retention of an integrated, acceptable self" (125) . O'Shaughnessy's own tack places Morrison's use of the community in an Afro-American tradition of song and dance when she suggests that the community functions as a chorus. She expands the notion of community to include readers in a "community beyond" the margins of the texts. G'Shaunessey notes that critic Cynthia Davis also directs her attention toward understanding how individuals attempt to forge identity either by working within or by transcending their immediate community (125). Barbara Christian's "Community and Nature: The Novels of Toni Morrison," Journal of Ethnic Studies 7.4 (1980) : 65-78, looks at "nature's relationship to the human community," i.e., nature's role in the formation of the community's values and the effects those values have on how communities view focal characters in the novels (78). More recently, Melvin Dixon explores the geography of Morrison's novels as the landscapes in which characters discover their identities. Though he is still concerned with interrelationships between individuals and their communities, Dixon's more thorough treatment of community also suggests that Morrison's novels are "bildungsromans of entire communities and racial idioms rather than the voice of a single individual," requiring us to "read the life of the community as the text and context of an individual's articulation of voice" (164) . Though these studies are valuable for helping us to understand community in Morrison's works, they stop short of examining the often violent interaction among community members, or the seemingly 29 methodical ways that violence perpetuates itself within the community. Like other critics interested in Morrison's communities, Valerie Smith argues that "assuming identity is . . . a communal gesture" in The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Song of Solomon. However, she also points out that these novels do not "address the hard questions directly"; for example, they do not "undertake to explain . . . why [communities] displace their self-hatred onto a communal scapegoat" ("The Quest for and Discovery of Identity in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon" 722). Indeed, though critics frequently allude to the presence of the scapegoat in Morrison's communities, as well as his/her stabilizing and harmonizing function within the community, most analyses settle for a mere mention of this phenomenon. Barbara Hill Rigney proves an exception when she places Sula within the scapegoat tradition and writes that Sula should be seen not as a "celebration of the heroism of black women, but an indictment of society's immoral and irresponsible need to create scapegoats" (Lilith's Daughter) . However, regardless of whether or not we indict society for scapegoating, scapegoats provide a focus for violence and communities in Morrison's fiction. As a result, the question of the function of the scapegoat in Morrison's communities, the conditions that create a need for a scapegoat, and the violence surrounding him/her become central concerns. Moreover, critics have focused their attention only on Pecola Breedlove and Sula as scapegoats; however, that list should also include Shadrack (Sula), Pilate (Song of Solomon), and Beloved (Beloved) , all of whom function as sacrificial victims around whom violence roils and communities coalesce.
2 I do not mean to attribute all violence within Morrison's works to oppression by a dominant society. Individual responsibility for violence must be taken into account. It is perhaps more fair to argue that Oppression serves as a constant and influential backdrop for violence within Morrison's communities. At some point, the distinction between violence driven by individual personality must be identified. However, Morrison does go to great lengths to show how existing in an oppressive social structure and the suffering experienced within that structure often leads to violence, regardless of individual personalities. In fact, for the most part, René Girard treats violence that grows out of mimetic desire that originates with the individual in normal circumstances. Girard writes that since cultural eclipse is above all a social crisis, there is a strong tendency to explain it by social, and especially, moral causes. After all human relations disintegrate in the process and the subjects of those relations cannot be utterly innocent of this phenomenon. But, rather than blame themselves, people inevitably blame either society as a whole, which costs them 30 nothing, or other people who seem particularly harmful for easily identifiable reasons. {The Scapegoat 14). CHAPTER
Narrative Violence and the Return of the Repressed in The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye begins with the
"unyielding earth" and Pecola Breedlove's pain and psychological disintegration. The novel begins in guilt and with a sense of hopelessness, and an image of the wasteland unredeemed: "Not even the gardens fronting the lake showed marigolds that year. . . . It never occurred to us that the earth itself might be unyielding. . . . What is clear now is that of all that hope, fear, lust, love, and grief, nothing remains but Pecola and the unyielding earth" (9). Through her chapters' titles, Morrison alludes to a basic disruption in the natural order, a subversion or perversion of how things should be. She gives the titles of her chapters the names of the seasons, yet their order is disrupted. The promise for renewal that the chapter entitled "Spring" seems to hold out is wholly absent, for this chapter begins with the violent pasts of Pecola Breedlove's mother and father, and ends with a father's rape of his daughter, the story of a pedophile--
Soaphead Church— and the destruction of a helpless dog. The chapter entitled "Summer," with which we associate growth and maturity, depicts only violence, madness, and the continuing
31 32
disenfranchisement and dissolution of an oppressed
commmunity. Thus, Morrison calls our attention to a pervasive and elemental reversal of the natural order: the
oppression of black society by a dominant white ruling class.
We might hope that Morrison's novel would explain why,
of all that hope and love and grief, there is nothing left.
Yet Morrison's narrator offers to tell us only how, claiming that "why" is too difficult to handle (9). Ultimately, The
Bluest Eye's narrator cannot explain the causes of this
unnatural order or expose the roots of rampant violence that
infects this novel. This violence is motivated by a pervasive self-loathing, an intolerable self-hatred that expresses itself in and seeks expurgation through the sacrifice of a young girl, Pecola
Breedlove. Her persecution, though, finally seems empty and unredemptive. The community's self-loathing, in turn, is the result of a white standard of beauty that none within the community can attain. Despite the narrator's claims that she will tell us only "how," unraveling the chain of metonymic substitions in Morrison's novel can help to explain the "how" and the "why" of Pecola Breedlove's sacrifice and the
frustration, isolation, and self-loathing of an entire community at odds with itself, unable to unravel the mystery of its origins in violence. In a chain of metonymic substitutions, deferrals of the
forward-moving plot, Morrison's novel "repeats" the original act of violence that has generated the narratable— white oppression, the "irritation ... which demands narration"
(Brooks Reading for the Plot 103). Those substitutions do 33 not name the trauma, yet they repeat it in an effort to work through its memory without actually naming it. The trauma that disrupts Morrison's community and the linear progression of her narrative is that unnameable oppression. The originary violence is repeated when Pecola Breedlove is victimized time and again by her mother and father and by members of the black community in Lorain who identify themselves not with their community but with their white oppressors. These repetitions reveal how one young girl,
Pecola Breedlove, becomes the victim of an entire community's
frustration and hatred.
Toni Morrison begins The Bluest Eye with a whispered secret, a secret she gradually reveals throughout her novel.
A series of different openings for the novel is the first set of substitutions that attempts to reveal the secret through metonymic substitution. For the metaphor of The Bluest Eye,
Morrison substitutes her condensation of an excerpt from a
Dick and Jane storybook. The excerpt contains not only most of the elements of the plot, but also the characters, the narrative crisis, and the community crisis. It is the first in the chain of substitutions that makes up the novel and the characters' lives.
The Dick and Jane story describes the American dream, the privilege and wealth that the black community in Lorain has been taught that they should desire by the white community, yet from which they are barred by white society.
The "pretty" "green and white house," "very nice" Mother, and
"smiling" Father exemplify the alleged contented and stable lifestyle of the typical American, middle-class, white 34
family. The excerpt also exemplifies the illusion of
affluence and the happiness the black community feels are
concomitant with that affluence toward which it strives:
Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family. Mother, Father, Dick, and Jane live in the green and white house. They are very happy. See Jane. She has a red dress. She wants to play. Who will play with Jane. See the cat. It goes meow-meow. Come and play. The kitten will not play. See Mother. Mother is very nice. Mother, will you play with Jane. Mother laughs. Laugh, Mother, laugh. See Father. He is big and strong. Father, will you play with Jane? Father is smiling. Smile, Father, smile. See the dog. Bowwow goes the dog. Do you want to play with Jane? See the dog run. Run, dog, run. Look, look. Here comes a friend. The friend will play with Jane. They will play a good game. Play, Jane, play. (7)
And, significantly, the Breedloves' "pretty green and
white house" is a storefront, cold and harsh, with broken
furniture, inadequate plumbing, no privacy, and not enough heat. The Mother, Pauline Breedlove, is anything but happy and nice. She abandons Pecola, turns away, directing her affection and protection to her surrogate daughter, the daughter of the white family for whom she works as a maid and cook. The Father, albeit smiling like the father in Dick and Jane, will "play" with Pecola, by raping her, giving her a child that will die, and eventually driving her deep into herself and madness. And, to complete the plot as it will unravel, the imaginary friend that Pecola conjures up in her madness is the friend who turns up to play with Jane in the excerpt. Even with this child of her imagination, Pecola struggles to maintain the illusion— the illusion that she has not only blue eyes, but the bluest eyes, and the illusion 35 that with her blue eyes she will meet the American white ruling class's standard for beauty and, thus, be loved.
Finally, Morrison's variations graphically illustrate how the American dream has become perverted for and distorts the
lives of many African-Americans, how the dream is unattainable and ultimately meaningless for the majority of
African-Americans.^
Through pure form, Morrison attempts in these repetitions of the excerpt to speak the unspeakable secret of her novel. Repetitions of the excerpt and their progressive unreadability repeat not only theme and action, but also serve as a model for the novel's narrative strategy. Morrison inscribes the Dick and Jane excerpt three times, though each time there is a difference. In the first instance, the excerpt maintains its original punctuation.
However, in the second case, the excerpt retains only the spaces between sentences and words and eliminates punctuation and upper- and lower-case letters. Finally, in the third instance, the words are run together without spaces and with no punctuation. Once punctuation and the spaces between the words are removed, the excerpt becomes a collapsed, inactive metaphor. However, until the novel has come to its conclusion, the trauma depicted in this running together of the Dick and Jane passages is unnamed, and the metaphor remains collapsed. The passages constitute only the first links in the chain of metonymic substitutions that attempt, but fail, to reveal the secret of the novel. 36
The orthographical collapse in the third rendering of
the excerpt graphically illustrates the leveling of
difference among the characters that is symptomatic of
Girard's "sacrificial crisis" {Violence and the Sacred 49).
The condensed version of Dick and Jane depicts the collapse
of the relationships among family members; their roles are
inverted or perverted as Mother abandons and Father rapes
daughter. Mrs. Breedlove rejects her own daughter, adopting
in her place a white child, her not-daughter. The love and
attention meant for Pecola is redirected to this child.
Instead, Pecola becomes the target of her mother's anger and
alienation. Family relationships break down further. By
raping Pecola, Cholly crosses the boundary that separates him
from his daughter. The distinction that ordinarily would
remove Pecola as an object of his lust vanishes. She becomes not-daughter, not-child, but an object of violence— she
becomes a victim of Cholly's rage and impotence. Finally,
repetition of the Dick and Jane passage also reminds us of
the interminability of the pattern of reciprocal violence and
the sacrificial crisis.
The Bluest Eye tries to start several times; each beginning attempts through either form or narrative, to name
the trauma, yet each fails. Following the passages from the
Dick and Jane primer, the novel opens again with an
italicized passage in which Claudia reveals that "there were
no marigolds in the fall," even though this knowledge is
repressed, kept "quiet" (9). Claudia rightly identifies the
cause of the trauma and the condition of the community for which the sterility of the ground is an apt metaphor 37
— "It never occurred to us that the earth itself might be unyielding" (9). Her statement reveals that she and her sister are aware that the state of the community is an unsatisfactory one, that Pecola has suffered for the community, and that oppression of the black community in
Lorain has established conditions in which violence thrives.
Yet the real cause of their pain and the violence in the community remains unnameable. Within this second beginning, resistance to naming the trauma has broken down further, yet its full expression remains locked in negation. The novel's second beginning describes elements of the plot, yet it does not reveal the secret. Thus, the novel lapses into metonymy again; rather than explicitly confronting the trauma, the novel negates it. The novel admits or seems to admit that it will not deal with that "why," choosing instead to focus on
"how": "There is nothing really more to say— except why. And since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how" (9). Claudia and the novel itself seem almost purposefully to withhold their secret. They seem to want to express the knowledge, to have awareness of it, but to be unwilling to speak of it.
In part, one reason why the origins of violence in oppression are so difficult to uncover is because of the scapegoat mechanism at work in the community. The purpose of the scapegoat is to obscure the root causes of violence and to reassign blame for the crisis of violence to one individual, in Lorain's case, a defenseless black girl,
Pecola Breedlove. In The Scapegoat, René Girard identifies several "signs" of the victim, characteristics that 38
traditionally identify the typical scapegoat. Among others,
the most important "sign" of the victim is his/her
relationship to the community. The scapegoat is at once a
member of and an outcast from the community— the victim
belongs and is familiar enough to the community to be a
suitable object for the projection of its own guilt. In
addition, the scapegoat "combines the marginality of the
insider/outsider," and is strangely familiar and foreign to
other members of the community {The Scapegoat 4)— "the crisis
is seen as a mysterious illness introduced into the community
by an outsider" (83) who is "an isolated and unique figure"
{Violence and the Sacred 79). The sacrifice of this insider/outsider is designed to end an otherwise irreversible
chain of reciprocal violence and assuage the community's
guilt, for the scapegoat can be victimized without generating more violence:
the paradox of the mimetic cycle is that men can almost never share peacefully an object they all desire, but they can always share an enemy they all hate because they can join together in destroying him [her] and then no lingering hostilities remain, at least for a while. (Girard, Violent Origins, 128)
The scapegoat is also characterized in many cases as possessing some distinguishing physical disability:
"sickness, madness, genetic deformities, accidental injuries, and even disabilities in general tend to polarize persecutors" {The Scapegoat 18). Pecola Breedlove believes
strongly in her own distinctive ugliness and, thus, epitomizes the learned self-hatred that poisons the community. The "difference" that sets Pecola apart is her 39
"ugliness," her belief in which has been carefully cultivated by her family and reinforced by the dominant culture:
The Breedloves did not live in a storefront because they were having temporary difficulty adjusting to the cutbacks at the plant. They lived there because they were poor and black, and they stayed there because they were ugly. Although their poverty was traditional and stultifying, it was not unique. But their ugliness was unique. No one could have convinced them that they were not relentlessly and aggressively ugly. . . . It was as though some mysterious, all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question. The master had said, "You are ugly people." They looked about themselves and saw nothing to contradict the statement; saw, in fact, support for it leaning out from every billboard, every movie, every glance. "Yes," they had said. "You are right." (34)^
However, the persecution of Pecola is only marginally a sacrifice according to Girard's theories of violence and sacrifice. As an outsider/insider, Pecola resembles Girard's scapegoat; however, the rape is an isolated incident of violence, not a community-sanctioned one. Pecola's
"sacrifice" is meant to return Lorain to order, to restore the distinctions among community that allow for harmony.
But, as an isolated, unscanctioned act of violence, persecuting Pecola does not have the ability to cure the community infected with impure, reciprocal violence. Nor does Cholly's rape of Pecola end her life, though it effectively eliminates any chances she might have had for a
"normal" one. In fact, the rape is an act of violence more characteristic of the incest/parricide crimes that, according to Girard, are more likely to precipitate a sacrificial crisis than end one. Thus, Cholly's rape of Pecola seems the antithesis of sacrifice. Her "sacrifice" perpetuates 40
the cycle of violence, rather than ending it. Finally, even
though Pecola resembles Girard's scapegoat, the community
never unites against her, and thus remains trapped in cycles
of reciprocal violence. Though Pecola's rape comes near the
end of the novel, the chain of violence continues, as do the
repetitions of violence that make up the novel's plot. Nonetheless, Pecola does possess some of the
characteristics and serve some of the functions of the
Girardean scapegoat. She is transformed, in the narrator's
eyes, into "all the waste and beauty of the world" (159).
For example, Cholly's mixed feelings of affection and
revulsion typify an attitude toward the scapegoat. There is
reverence on the one hand, and revulsion on the other, for the scapegoat has assumed all guilt and hatred for the
community: the scapegoat is both poison and cure for the community {Violence and the Sacred 83). Of the sacrificial victim's alleged crime, Girard writes, "Parricide and incest provide the community with exactly what it needs to represent and exorcise the effects of the sacrificial crisis" (Violence and the Sacred 83) . Finally, in the scenes with the
schoolboys and with Geraldine, Morrison aligns Pecola with other archetypal scapegoats, such as Christ.
The chain of metonymies that comprises The Bluest Eye
includes elements reminiscent of ritual and that illustrate the scapegoat mechanism. Characteristic of the repetitions that make up this novel, the scene in the schoolyard demonstrates how Lorain roils in violence and directs its anger against Pecola. At school, Pecola becomes the victim of her classmates in a scene that demonstrates how their own 41
self-hatred is projected onto her. The incident is at once a
return to the community's origins in violence and suggestive
of a ritual sacrifice of the scapegoat:
A group of boys was circling and holding at bay a victim, Pecola . . . They had extemporized a verse made up of two insults about matters over which the victim had no control: the color of her skin and speculations on the sleeping habits of an adult, wildly fitting in its incoherence. That they themselves were black, or that their own father had similarly relaxed habits was irrelevant. It was their contempt for their own blackness that gave the first insult its teeth. They seemed to have taken all of their smoothly cultivated ignorance, their exquisitely learned self-hatred, their elaborately designed hopelessness and sucked it up into a fiery cone of scorn that had burned for ages in the hollows of their minds— cooled— and spilled over lips of outrage, consuming whatever was in its path. They danced a macabre ballet around the victim, whom, for their own sake, they were prepared to sacrifice to the flaming pit. (55)
In The Bluest Eye, the narrator describes Pecola's tormentors as victims of self-loathing and self-hatred. To confront their own sense of inadequacy honestly and with the same venom with which they attack Pecola would be suicide, for it is their belief in their own ugliness that leads them to persecute Pecola. But, because Pecola is defenseless, the boys can vent their own anger and frustration without fear of reprisal. She is the scapegoat who must pay for their own guilt and frustration, the scapegoat who will allow them to feel good about themselves, if only temporarily.
The schoolboys' treatment of Pecola is both a foreshadowing of Pecola's rape and a repetition of white oppression, the generative act of violence that creates the narrative. As a single incident in the plot, it looks both forward and backward. The difference in this repetition. 42 however, is its communal nature. The boys seem united against Pecola. Ultimately, however, because the community can hardly be said to sanction this violence against Pecola, the incident remains an isolated, unsanctioned act of reciprocal violence.
The incident involving Geraldine and Pecola also repeats the violence directed toward the black community by demonstrating how alienation from communal values and the wholesale purchase of the dominant culture's value system divides one segment of the population against another. Few in Lorain are as adept as Geraldine at projecting outward their self-loathing as blacks or at getting "rid of the funkiness." Geraldine's disgust with things black, with
"funkiness," epitomizes the self-hatred instilled in the community by its white oppressors:
The dreadful funkiness of passion, the funkiness of nature, the funkiness of the wide range of human emotions. Wherever it erupts, this Funk, they wipe it away; where it crusts, they dissolve it; wherever it drips, flowers, or clings, they find it and fight it until it dies. They fight this battle all the way to the grave. (58)
To describe Geraldine, Morrison halts the forward movement of the plot, sacrificing it to work through the
"trauma" that has resulted in Geraldine's unusually vindictive attitude toward Pecola. The forward-moving plot is disrupted in order to relive Geraldine's plight, a deferral that returns readers to the character's origins, to her beginnings. This interruption of the forward movement of the plot constitutes an act of violence perpetrated against the narrative's progression, or at least against our sense of 43
the structure of traditional narrative. Similarly, it
reveals how continued violence within black communities
forestalls escape from systematic oppression. Finally, because the incident does not name oppression by the white society as the trauma that afflicts Lorain, it simply provides another metonymic substitution for and repetition of that trauma.
By denying her ovm blackness, Geraldine feels she can escape the frustration blacks experience in the dominantly white culture. Geraldine's violence toward Pecola is motivated by her belief in the white society's standard of beauty, a belief that causes her to hate all things black.
Moreover, her hatred of herself is infectious, a destructive legacy that she passes on to her children, who in turn victimize others. Cynthia Davis refers to Geraldine as a character who projects onto others her own fears and misgivings about herself and her race (326). The most immediate victim of her anti-funkiness is her son, Louis
Junior ;
[Junior] hated to see the swings, slides, monkey bars, and seesaws empty and tried to get kids to stick around as long as possible. White kids; his mother did not like him to play with niggers. She had explained to him the difference between colored people and niggers. They were easily identifiable. Colored people were neat and quiet; niggers were dirty and loud. He belonged to the former group: he wore white shirts and blue trousers; his hair was cut as close to his scalp as possible to avoid any suggestion of wool, the part was etched into his hair by the barber. In winter his mother put Jergens Lotion on his face to keep the skin from becoming ashen. Even though he was light-skinned, it was possible to ash. The line between colored and nigger was not always clear; subtle and telltale signs threatened to erode it, and the watch had to be constant. (71) 44
The frustration that Louis Junior feels at being denied his own identity as a black finds expression in the violence he directs toward little girls: "More and more Junior enjoyed bullying girls. It was easy making them scream and run. How he laughed when they fell down and their bloomers showed. When they got up, their faces red and crinkled, it made him feel good" (72). Junior's self-disgust and frustration drive him to search for suitable victims, those weaker than himself and, thus, from whom he need not fear retribution.
In this way, the venom with which his mother has stung him spreads throughout the community. The little girls Junior abuses become, like him, victims of his mother's self-hatred, and the chain of reciprocal violence lengthens.
Pecola, too, becomes Junior's victim, and indirectly
Geraldine's, in yet another repetition of the violence of oppression. When Junior tricks Pecola into coming into his house by offering her a free kitten and perhaps some genuine kindness, her role as scapegoat and innocent victim is played out again. To Pecola Junior's house is a showplace: "How beautiful, she thought. What a beautiful house" (73).
Prophetically, Pecola also notices, among the lamps and rugs,
"a color picture of Jesus Christ hung on a wall with the prettiest paper flowers fastened on the frame" (73). But
Pecola has little time to admire, for Junior immediately turns to his tricks: "She was deep in admiration when
Junior said 'Here!'" and threw "a big black cat right in her face" (73). A battle ensues, and Geraldine returns home to find Pecola, terrorized by Junior, crumpled on the floor, and 45
her favorite cat singed on top of the radiator. Geraldine's
ire is roused by Pecola, the image of everything she detests
the most, the epitome of all that she has rejected and
abhors— a funky little black girl:
She looked at Pecola. Saw the dirty torn dress, the plaits sticking out on her head, hair matted where the plaits had come undone, the muddy shoes with the wad of gum peeping out from between the cheap soles, the soiled socks, one of which had been walked down in the heel of the shoe. She had seen this little girl all of her life. . . . "Get out," she said, her voice quiet. "You nasty little black bitch. Get out of my house." (75)
As Pecola leaves the house, defeated and tricked, Morrison evokes the image of another scapegoat: "Pecola turned to find the front door and saw Jesus looking down at her with sad and unsurprised eyes, his long brown hair parted in the middle, the gay paper flowers twisted around his face" (7 6). At
Geraldine's hands, Pecola becomes the victim of an isolated instance of violence, not a community sanctioned, ritual violence. As an act of "impure" violence, Geraldine's and
Junior's violence toward Pecola fuels the sacrifical crisis within the community.
The pattern of return and working through, of deferring the forward movement of the plot to work through a troubling and destructive past, is continued when Morrison interrupts the forward movement of the plot to recount Pauline
Breedlove's history. The deferral of the plot is at once a return to Pauline's origins and an attempt on the character's part to work through her troubled background— a narrative return of the repressed. Pauline narrates her history in an effort to understand it, to move beyond it somehow, both 46
emotionally and psychologically. The eruption of Pauline's history into the narrative at this point is the return of her
repressed and painful past. Moreover, the novel repeats the trauma that motivates the plot; in other words, Pauline's history is a repetition of the community's history of
oppression. Also, within her story Pauline chronicles her
infection with the values of the dominant society and her abandonment of her daughter. To stop the plot in order for the novel to work through Pauline's history is tantamount to an act of violence within the narrative. It is as if the novel and its characters suffer from a repetition compulsion— they repeat the original trauma, working through
it in detours from the forward-moving plot. The narrative structure, then, mimics the violence within the community.
This deferral of the forward-moving plot has the flavor of a psychoanalytic narrative, for in Polly's working through, Morrison employs a third-person narrator's voice intertwined with the voice of Pauline herself. The introduction of Pauline's voice into the narrator's description of her past constitutes yet another detour—
Pauline's voice defers the forward movement of her own plot.
As the third-person narrator recalls the events that have brought Pauline to a particular moment in the plot, the actual plot of her deferral is deferred. At this point, Morrison's narrative becomes a Chinese box of detours. For example, the third-person narrator tells us that "after several months of doing day work, she [Pauline] took a steady
job in the home of a family of slender means and nervous, pretentious ways" (94). This passage is followed by 47
Pauline's first-person narrative: "Choly commenced to
getting meaner and meaner and wanted to fight me all the time. I give him as good as I got" (94). The first-person voice interrupts the third-person narrator's account of
Pauline's tragic history, as if Pauline's memories can no
longer be repressed, as if one repetition in the present must be explained by recounting an earlier, also previously repressed repetition in the past. Through these detours the plot moves forward, zig-zagging its way through painful,
repressed memories in an attempt to work through and escape plot. We detour to hear a first-person "why," while the plot (s) continues to move forward, explaining a third-person
"how."
Pauline's detours reveal how the origins of the novel,
Pauline's character, Pecola's demise, and the crisis in the community are rooted firmly in oppression, the "brown speck" that demands narration. Pauline Breedlove's history begins in a "brown speck" (92). From that tiny speck of erosion and rot, Pauline loses her tooth. The loss of her tooth is emblematic to her of the loss of her beauty. With the death of hope that loss embodies, Pauline turns away from her family. It is the beginning of the end for Pauline and ultimately for her daughter. Ironically, Pauline imagines that the loss of her tooth is the result of "conditions . . . the setting that would allow it [the brown speck] to exist in the first place" (92). Those paved streets Pauline originally marveled at could not mask the "weakened roots" and malleable "brown putty" that lay beneath the surface, breeding ground for dissatisfaction and destruction (92-93). 48
One day, Pauline recognizes, the "weakened roots" would
" [respond] to severe pressure . . . leaving a ragged stump behind," the smoking remainder of the tree on which Pecola is sacrificed (92-93). In another example of a deferral that interrupts the forward-moving plot to return to origins, we learn that Pauline is surprised by the outcome of her life in "that young and growing Ohio town whose side streets, even, were paved with concrete"— she asks "what could go wrong?" (93) .
Narration in the third-person is interrupted at this point when Pauline's first-person voice defers the forward-movement of her deferral again: "Me and Cholly was getting along good then. We come up north; supposed to be more jobs and all.
We moved into two rooms up over a furniture store, and I set about housekeeping" (93). The intrusion of the first-person narrator at this point heightens our sense that the novel and the character are returning to origins, attempting to restore the original order that prevailed in Pauline's life, and our awareness that the novel is returning to a time before the opening of the forward-moving plot. Just as sacrifice repeats the original act of violence, so the plot repeats the characters' traumas in an effort to restore the non- narratable. As we can see from these examples, each detour is parallel to another act of violence within the community, in fact, describes the chain of violence within the community.
Pauline's need to level the difference between herself and other members of the community, whose goal it is to eradicate difference between themselves and the white 49
community, breeds the violence that leads to the dissolution
of Pauline's family. She rejects her own cultural values for
those of the community in which she finds herself "still no more than a girl" and who have themselves abandoned their
traditional values (92). Pauline finds herself alone in a
strange town where "northern colored folks was different,
too. Dicty-like. No better than whites for meanness" (93).
Nonetheless, out of loneliness, Pauline attempts to fit in
with the community. The problem, however, lies in Pauline's attempts to be like the "northern colored folks," who wear
high heels and model themselves after white emblems of
"perfection": "when Pauline tried to wear them, they
aggravated her shuffle into a pronounced limp" (93). Other
attempts to belong to the group of women in her community
also backfire on Pauline, though she gradually begins to
assume their values: "When she tried to make up her face as
they did, it came off badly. Their goading glances and
snickers at her way of talking (saying 'chil'ren') and dressing developed in her a desire for new clothes" (94).
The values Pauline wishes to adopt, and eventually does adopt, are the values of the white middle-class. She witnesses first-hand white families that "couldn't get along with one another worth nothing" (94). Pauline notices, but does not understand, that the society has been torn apart by their acquisitiveness and greed: "You'd think," Pauline says,
"with a pretty house like that and all the money they could holt on to, they would enjoy one another" (95). But Pauline does not recognize that the more they acquire, the more they 50 desire, and she continues to sink deeper into the illusion their wealth creates. The motion pictures Pauline frequents give her illusion fuller body. To escape her loneliness, Pauline discovers the movies, where "in the dark her memory was refreshed, and she succumbed to her earlier dreams. Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another— physical beauty" (97). Labeling the values Pauline acquires in the movies as "probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought," Morrison identifies their source as the ideas that ultimately destroy Pauline's family and daughter; she writes that the idea of physical beauty "originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion" (97) .
These values generate desire and violence within Pauline's community, and eventually drive her daughter to madness. The movies virtually destroy Pauline, severing her forever from the values that are her and her family's only hope of survival : In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap. She forgot lust and simple caring for. She regarded love as possessive mating, and romance as the goal of the spirit. It would be for her a well-spring from which she would draw the most destructive emotions, deceiving the lover and seeking to imprison the beloved, curtailing freedom in every way. (97)
Yet Pauline finds herself enmeshed in these destructive values, captive of the films in which, for her, "the flawed became whole, the blind sighted, and the lame and halt throw away their crutches" (97). (The movies also illustrate the dissolution of difference— everyone becomes the same if the 51 lame throw away their crutches and the blind can see.) The dreams "projected through the ray of light from above and behind" (as in Plato's cave) prove irresistible for her. She rejects completely her own culture's values, values that hold families like the MacTeers together. Worst of all, however, watching the movies, in which she saw the "white men taking such good care of they women," "made coming home hard, and looking at Cholly hard" (97). Ultimately, the movies drive
Pauline out of her household and lead her to disown her family and harden against them. At the conclusion of her narrative, Pauline asserts that she only infrequently recalls her painful past: "But it ain't like that anymore. . . .
There is sure to be a glory. The only thing I miss sometimes is that rainbow. But like I say, I don't recollect it much anymore" (104). Nonetheless, the narrative detour into her past resembles a return of the repressed and a return to a past that she cannot entirely escape.
When Morrison follows Pauline's history with yet another detour of the forward-moving plot, she provides perhaps the clearest example of how members of the community displace their anger as victims of white oppression onto members of their own community. In this detour from the forward-moving plot, the narrator recounts Cholly's history and gives an account of the cycle of violence and its origins in white oppression. In another instance of the return of the repressed, the novel, then, in order to move forward, must first work through Cholly's trauma. Erupting into the narrative like a repressed memory, the story of Cholly's 52
violent past metonymically repeats the novel's tale of oppression. His history begins in abandonment:
When Cholly was four days old, his mother wrapped him in two blankets and one newspaper and placed him on a junk heap by the railroad. His Great Aunt Jimmy, who had seen her niece carrying a bundle out of the back door, rescued him. She beat his mother with a razor strap and wouldn't let her near the baby after that. Aunt Jimmy raised Cholly herself, but took delight sometimes in telling him of how she had saved him. He gathered from her that his mother wasn't right in the head. But he never had a chance to find out, because she ran away shortly after the razor strap, and no one had heard of her since. (105)
Moreover, Cholly's father rejects him out of hand.
Cholly searches for his father who had vanished long before, but when he finds him Cholly's father is more interested in the crap game than in Cholly:
But Fuller had turned back to the game that was about to begin anew. He bent down to toss a bill on the ground, and waited for a throw. When it was gone, he stood up and in a vexed and whiny voice shouted at Cholly, 'Tell that bitch she get her money. Now, get the fuck outta my face !'" (123) .
Cholly's violent history continues when during his first sexual encounter he is degraded by two white coonhunters.
After surprising Cholly and Darlene in their act of lovemaking, two white men force Cholly to perform for them:
With a violence born of total helplessness, he pulled her dress up, lowered his trousers and underwear. . . . Cholly moving faster, looked at Darlene. He hated her. He almost wished he could do it— hard, long, and painfully, he hated her so much. The flashlight wormed its way into his guts and turned the sweet taste of muscadine into rotten fetid bile" (117) . 53
Moreover, Cholly learns how easily his anger can be projected
onto a defenseless victim:
Cholly had not hated the white men; he hated, despised, the girl. Even a half-remembrance of this episode, along with myriad other humiliations, defeats, and emasculations, could stir him into flights of depravity that surprised himself— but only himself. Somehow he could not astound. He could only be astounded. So he gave that up, too. (37)
Cholly's anger must vent itself, yet he cannot attack the armed coonhunters who humiliate and emasculate him while they wait for their dogs to tree the coon. Cholly's situation demonstrates the powerlessness he feels in the white culture.4
Cholly vents his anger and frustration on Pecola's mother, Pauline. Cholly and Pauline's fighting, calculated and frequent, is nonetheless bitter and fueled by their lifetimes of mistrust and mistreatment. Just as Cholly cannot hope to retaliate against his white oppressors, he cannot vent his anger or frustration on his mother who has long since disappeared, nor can he attack his father. So, instead, Cholly destroys that which is within striking distance, his wife: "She was one of the few things abhorrent to him that he could touch and therefore hurt. He poured out on her the sum of all his inarticulate fury and aborted desires. Hating her, he could leave himself intact" (37).
Finally, Cholly also turns to Pecola to assuage his guilt and frustration. Because she is helpless and completely at his mercy, Pecola is a suitable victim for his anger. In fact, her helplessness infuriates him because it 54
is reminiscent of his own helplessness, his own inability to take control of his life. Cholly rapes Pecola out of revulsion for her and his own helplessness:
The sequence of his emotions was revulsion, guilt, pity, then love. His revulsion was a reaction to her young, helpless, hopeless presence. Her back hunched that way; her head to one side as though crouching from a permanent and unrelieved blow. Why did she have to look so whipped? She wasa child— unburdened— why wasn't she happy? The clear statement of her misery was an accusation. He wanted to break her neck— but tenderly. Guilt and impotence rose in a bilious duet. What could he do for her— ever? What give her? What say to her? What could a burned-out black man say to the hunched back of his eleven year old daughter? If he looked into her face, he would see those haunted, loving eyes. The hauntedness would irritate him— the love would move him to fury. How dare she love him. Hadn't she any sense at all? What was he supposed to do about that? (127)
Pecola's rape forms yet another link in the chain of reciprocal violence, a link similar to her victimization at the hands of her mother, the schoolboys, and Geraldine. Deferral of the forward-moving plot clearly depicts Cholly's history of violence, his anger and frustration, his powerlessness in the face of oppression, and how his defeats and losses manifest themselves in his rape of his daughter.
Moreover, the rape of Pecola is a repetition of Cholly's humiliation at the hands of the white h u n te r s.^
Even though Pecola meets many of the criteria for the scapegoat, her rape cannot be the sacrifice that will redeem the community and return it to order, primarily because the cycle of violence continues for both Pecola and the community; she is beaten by her mother for "allowing" herself to be raped, and her father abandons her: "They say the way her mama beat her she lucky to be alive herself" (148) . We 55 watch Pecola "[step] over into madness," and Claudia tells us that the "damage done was total" (157) . Pecola is left isolated and scorned, though she has served a limited role as the receptor of guilt in the community:
All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us— all who knew her— felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used—to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved out contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength. (159)
Ultimately, however, we see that the community's impulse to violence has not been effectively thwarted. The familiar tendency to scapegoat others in their community is evident in the women of the community's willingness to condemn all of the Breedloves: "None of them Breedloves seem right anyhow.
That boy is off somewhere every minute, and the girl was always foolish" (147). Finally, Mrs. Breedlove and Pecola both are cast out to "that little brown house she and her mother moved to on the edge of town" (159). Claudia also tells us that any apparent transformation of the community is false: "we yawned in the fantasy of our strength . . . and fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive . . . we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word" (159) .
Thus, we are left still searching for the restoration of difference and for some element of plot, some reenactment of 56 the original trauma, that can release the novel from plottedness. Though the community has not been released from violence through the "sacrifice" of Pecola, Claudia's
statements at the close of the novel constitute the narrative
sacrifice that can release the novel from plottedness, for it
is here that the novel ends and not with Pecola's rape or lapse into madness. Within Claudia's account of the community's state at the close of the novel there is the suggestion that some semblance of unity and order has been reestablished, though it is important to note that release from violence has been effected for only a handful of the characters.
For example, Claudia's awareness of the playing out of this sacrificial crisis and of Pecola's fate suggest that
Pecola's "sacrifice" has affected her positively. For example, Freida and Claudia both demonstrate a new selflessness when they decide to forego personal gain, a new bicycle, in favor of planting their seeds as an offering for the life of Pecola's baby. Their actions are driven by a need for "someone to want the black baby to live— just to counteract the universal love of white baby dolls, Shirley
Temples, and Maureen Peals" (148). In her statement of love for Pecola and her awareness that "the land of the entire country was hostile," Claudia comes as close as possible to naming the root of Lorain's troubles without actually saying that white oppression has devastated them and mired them in a battle against themselves:
I even think now that the land of the entire country was hostile to marigolds that year. This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not 57
nurture, certain fruits it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live. We are wrong, of course, but it doesn't matter. It's too late. At least on the edge of my town, among the garbage and the sunflowers of my town, it's much, much, much, too late. (160)
Even'though Claudia asserts that it is "too late" for
Pecola, it is apparent that she will escape the throes of violence that have stifled her community. Her selflessness and willingness to love Pecola's "black baby" suggests that she has achieved a kind of maturity and embraces values of tolerance and community (148). However, Mr. Henry's fondling of Freida and Mr. MacTeer's violent reaction to that violation of his daughter testify that even Claudia's family is not entirely immune from reciprocal violence (80-81).
Nonetheless, Claudia and the MacTeers demonstrate that by maintaining their own set of values they can immunize themselves, at least to a degree, against the kind of violence that annihilates the Breedloves.
Finally, except for Claudia and Freida, persecution of the scapegoat has merely returned the community to the
"order" of oppression that will almost certainly lead blacks to persecute each other again. Lorain's inhabitants are the victims of that order. Sacrificing each other, they cannot hope to bring about permanent change in their lives or effect any lasting transformation of the social structures that
7 oppress them.
Morrison states that in her first two novels, "the movement, the rhythm is circular, although the circles are broken. If you go back to the beginnings, you get pushed 58
along toward the end" (124) . Through this circular,
recursive pattern, the novel has attempted to work through the trauma through a chain of metonymic substitutions and returns of the repressed. Claudia's transformation allows,
indeed compels us, to return to the beginning and the middles of this narrative, infusing meaning into the metonymies that comprise the narrative chain. The characters in The Bluest
Eye, and indeed, the narrative progression itself, are gripped by an anxiety and fear that lead them to try to
identify the origin of their troubles. The narrative structure is like some slow wrangling away of layer upon layer of secrecy in an attempt to understand the patterns of violence and victimization, that "irritation that demands narration"; it is an attempt to express the horrible secret through form.
Finally, however, the questions of whether or not the novel can escape plottedness and the community escape violence are unresolved. In Violence and the Sacred,
Girard's theories of sacrifice and the sacrificial crisis leave open the possibility that the sacrificial crisis will find only a temporary "cure" in sacrifice. In fact, from a
Girardean point of view, it is almost certain that another sacrificial crisis will ensue, and that the need for a sacrifice will arise again. The order to which sacrifice returns the community is a tenuous one at best, and unstable at worst. This is especially true in the case of Lorain where recognition is limited and sacrifice only perpetuates violence. Should the current crisis depicted in The Bluest
Eye be resolved, Lorain will almost certainly face another 59 crisis and create more Pecolas on which to vent its hatred.
Moreover, just as the sacrificial cycle will repeat itself,
so-called "closures" in traditional narratives will endlessly return us into the text, infusing and reinfusing the metonymies with meanings. As Peter Brooks writes, "the
traumatic moment . . . never can be mastered" {Reading for
the Plot 123).8
Thus, The Bluest Eye chronicles the lives of individuals struggling to survive within a system of oppression that denies blacks rights to their own values, beliefs, and identity. The narrative structure of this novel is based on repetition, just as this system of oppression is based on violence. Through form and theme, the novel struggles to reveal this system and to reveal that violence cannot create, can only destroy. Sacrificing Pecola cannot effect the order of society that causes blacks to victimize each other. The novel also tries to wrest to consciousness the notion that it is only by seeing through the pattern of violence and its roots in white oppression, that the black communities like Lorain can survive, can bind together to resist. Claudia is the only character who begins to suspect that the problem is a larger, more pervasive one. She succeeds in removing herself from the desire and the guilt that might lead down the same path of violence whose destructiveness she has witnessed. This is her crowning achievement. Releasing herself from guilt removes her from the cycle, even though she may not ultimately and explicitly assign the blame for the cycle to its rightful owners. 60
Nonetheless, as she shows us from the beginning, she will not be duped into the destructive pattern of desire. She will not be cowed into abandoning the values she seems to realize are the only chance for her society to survive in the face of white aggrandizement.
Finally, it would seem that Brooks has provided a model for understanding Claudia, her compulsion to narrate, her plot, and her escape from plot. Claudia's passage that closes the novel does not repeat the violence of the remainder of the novel. Instead, it attempts to locate the source of violence wrrhin her society. Her ending returns us to the beginning in which we witness Claudia rejecting Shirley Temple and white baby dolls and refusing to abandon her own values. There she demonstrates a resilient self-love and a love for her people's ways. She relishes her mother's laments and blues. She describes and clings to the memory of those hands that in winter did not want her to die. In telling the story of Pecola, Claudia successfully names the trauma. She reproduces it and works through it in order that she may move beyond it. She narrates the trauma associated with what she has seen happen to Pecola, recognizing that she can survive only by making sense out of that experience. 61
Notes
^ In "Self, Society, and Myth in Toni Morrison's Fiction," Contemporary Literature 23 (1982): 323-342, Cynthia Davis also emphasizes the suitability of black women in general as scapegoats, when she writes that "because they are doubly defined as failures and outsiders, [black women] are natural scapegoats for those seeking symbols of displaced emotions. Morrison shows the Look taking on monstrous proportions as the humiliated black male allies himself with the Third [white society] by making the black woman the object of his displaced fury." (329) Ultimately, the scapegoat plays a vital role within the community as a receptacle for guilt. Trudier Harris writes that the transfer of guilt is an essential part of the scapegoat ritual as defined by James Frazer. The scapegoat takes upon himself [or herself] the sins of the society. He [or she] becomes guilty and the people are in turn cleansed, or purged of their sins {Exorcising Blackness 16-17) .
^ In Toni Morrison's Developing Class Consciousness (Cranbury, N J : Associated University Presses, 1991), Dorothea Mbalia argues that Morrison is primarily concerned with racial issues in her first novel, and that it is not until later works that she reveals the class consciousness at the root of her novels' conflicts. However, Mbalia shows how "according to [Morrison], the African's self-image is destroyed at an early age as a result of the ruling class's . . . promotion of its own standard of beauty: long, stringy hair, preferably blond; keen nose, thin lips; and light eyes, preferably blue" (29). However, Mbalia writes "Morrison reveals her class consciousness by exploring the intraracial prejudices caused by petty bourgeois Africans, those v/ho aspire for the same goals and aspirations of the ruling class" (30).
^ Cynthia Davis confronts the problems of self-definition faced by Morrison's characters and, in general, their ontological status within an oppressive white society. In so doing, she applies Sartre's theories of the Other and of the Look— theories which suggest that it is through being perceived by others that we reaffirm our own existence, but also find our self assailed: we become an object in someone else's perceptions at the same time that we are finding the truth in our own existence through being observed. Through the internalization of white values, Davis suggests, Morrison's characters ally themselves with the Other. One result is that the image projected onto scapegoats is facilitated. The black characters desire to remain "free" and, therefore, must displace all of their own fears and 62
self-doubts onto the others, from whom they see themselves as detached (324-25). René Girard also places a desire to "be" the Other at the center of his theory of violence and the scapegoat. Violence is bred through the frustration that the Individual feels at not being able to attain this ontological status. Desire breeds a violence that then feeds on itself, until the scapegoat bears away the community's guilt and anguish {Violence and the Sacred). Almost by default, the black woman is the perfect scapegoat in an oppressed black society.
^ In Exorcising Blackness : Historical and Literary Lynchings and Ritual Burnings (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984), Trudier Harris describes the kind of victim that black men can become once emasculated both socially and psychologically. Once they are emasculated by a dominant society they turn their anger toward their families. She writes that Grange Copeland in Alice Walker's The Third Life of Grange Copeland has been reduced to a victimizing beast as a result of the emasculation he has suffered at the hands of the sharecropper system which Harris equates with the system of slavery prior to 1860 (36-37). Harris describes Walker's Grange as one whose "ability to take care of his family had been taken away" and whose "very bed has been invaded by the force which has refused him decent work"; he is, then, in Harris' words, "truly emasculated, and, by extension, literally without sexual power" (37). This is the case for Cholly Breedlove, who has perpetually been a victim, but who then turns almost by default into the victimizer. The case is even more dramatic and destructive for Grange's son, Brownfield, Harris writes, who "literally becomes a monster who sing 'yessuhs' in chorus to the plantation owners . . . but who beats his wife into ugliness, drives one of his daughters insane and another to prostitution" (38). The comparison with Cholly is a close one, though Cholly's violence is extended to Pecola. Pauline already firmly believes in her supposed ugliness and does not need to be beaten into belief.
^ Chikwenye Ogunyemi writes in "Order and Disorder in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye,” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 19.1 (1977): 112-120, that "the sacrifice [of Pecola) was ambiguous. Cholly sacrifices Pecola unconsciously and selfishly in order to exorcise from his spirit the nightmare of his first sexual experience by making his daughter's as harrowing as his" (117) .
^ Trudier Harris quotes Lillian Smith, "a Southern white woman writing about the social and sexual mores of the South," as saying that 'the lynched Negro becomes not an object that must die but a receptacle for every man's dammed- 63 up hate, and receptacle for every man's forbidden sex feelings'" (qtd. Exorcising Blackness 23). Harris writes of what she calls "a general belief which Billie Holliday alludes to in 'Strange Fruit,' that the tree upon which a man has been hanged will die because the 'fruit' it has been forced to bear is so unnatural. The 'charred stump' which points 'a blunt finger accusingly' at the sky begins a series of pathetic fallacies which produce an effect of nature's crying out to higher powers for allowing such a cosmic outrage to occur. . . Man and nature have died together, . . . and there is no peace" (99). Though the "ritual" violence in Morrison's novel is directed at Pecola, a member (if only marginally) in a race whose position in society is marginal already, the connection between nature and humans that Harris writes so eloquently of is strong— the earth upon which Pecola is "lynched" will not yield fruit; no flowers can grow in that barren earth. Barbara Christian asserts in "Community and Nature; The Novels of Toni Morrison" that the characters experience an inversion of the natural order; for example, she writes that Pecola "will not experience rebirth in the spring; rather she will be raped in the season of love . . . by her father, and will descend into madness in the sterile summer" (74). Indeed, more than the natural order of the seasons has been disrupted. The very order of the black community established and sustained by the outside white society is disrupted permanently. The seasons are not disrupted as a result of Pecola's rape— instead, Pecola's rape is the product of that inversion of the natural order by white society's repression of blacks. Also, in "A Way of Ordering Experience in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Sula," Faith of a (Woman) Writer (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), Robert Sargent asserts that "Pecola is both the communal and the familial scapegoat--she is continually defined by other characters as 'Black and ugly.' She also embodies the insanity of trying to be white in order to be loved--in the end blue eyes are not sufficient; she must have the bluest eyes" (231). Moreover, Sargeant writes that "She [Claudia] includes herself in the black community who used Pecola as a scapegoat" (233) . Sargent suggests that by using Pecola as a "first person character, Morrison explores the imaginative act that is required to make a person whole" in an effort to develop his point that the creative act is constitutive of the act of becoming human and whole. Interestingly, at this point he introduces the idea of the scapegoat. Perhaps the community is trying to find some wholeness for itself, or trying to maintain its illusion of wholeness. In any event, Pecola is the receptacle into which the community dumps its trash— its self-loathing, its fear and disgust at being black as well as being the scapegoat for another society, the society without. 64
^ Cynthia Davis writes convincingly of the conditions that define black communities like Lorain. She writes that "all of Morrison's characters exist in a world defined by its blackness and by the surrounding white society that both violates it and denies it. The destructive effect of the white society can take the form of outright physical violence, but oppression in Morrison's world is more often psychic violence. She rarely depicts white characters, for the brutality here is less a single act than a systematic denial of the reality of black lives" (In "Self, Society, and Myth" 323).
® However, even though violence within Morrison's communities and characters' need to escape the past are referred to here as problems or questions, it is inaccurate to refer to solutions or answers, for as Freud has said, analysis is interminable and, as Girard has said, violence within any community may experience a temporary lull as a result of sacrifice, but can never be fully eradicated. Other sources of violence— namely, Girard's inherently human mimetic desire— can still produce a sacrificial crisis within the community. Moreover, analysis will always lead to greater and greater depths of understanding. Transference within the psychoanalysis itself guarantees that a "solution" will remain illusive. Thus, Morrison does pose a solution of sorts; however, her "solution" addresses only one source of violence within the community. Furthermore, it is perhaps a limitation of Girard's masculinist view of violence that he insists on the eradicability of violence. As Morrison's own work shows, even after she poses her solution in Beloved, Jazz will return once again to the same "problem" of violence. CHAPTER II
The Open Wound: Oppression and Narrative Strategy in Sula
More than any of Toni Morrison's works, Sula resists
interpretation. It is the definitive "open" text, to borrow
Ego's phrase, "a galaxy of signj fiers" with innumerable entry points (S/Z 5). Violence, more wildly destructive than in The Bluest Eye, provides a map for finding our way through
Sula's labyrinth. Morrison herself claims that she doesn't
"shut doors at the end of books." "There is a resolution of a sort," Morrison says, "but there are always possibilities— choices" (qtd. in Jones 136). These purposeful gaps contribute to our sense that reading Sula is like probing an open wound. It gets messy poking around in Sula where the metaphors remain collapsed, the gaps persist, and the wound refuses to close.
Even though violence in The Bluest Eye is unrelenting, its forms are more insidious, covert. Violence in Sula is unmistakable, graphic, undeniable. More than one character is burned alive; large numbers are buried alive and drowned.
There are fights, plagues of robins, ice storms, collapsing bridges, casual humiliations. Thus, the need to understand the origins and effects of violence becomes more urgent.
65 66
Some violence can be attributed to accident or inaction:
Hannah's burning, for example, and Chicken Little's drowning. Other acts of violence are more openly self-destructive—
Eva apparently severs her leg in order to claim the insurance money. Plum plunges himself so far into drugs that he seeks a return to his mother's womb, and Tar Baby is content to drink himself to death, though he continues to sing beautifully along the way. The novel, in fact, chronicles the slow destruction over time of the entire community of the Bottom.
Within this maze of violence and violent self- destructiveness, we search for a source, and for a way out.
But, identifying the source of violence in the novel is relatively easy, for it is inscribed in the community's oppression by the dominant white society. Remaining at the periphery, this oppression nonetheless exerts its influence on the lives of the people of the Bottom. In fact, the community, the Bottom, is at the bottom of things in this novel. Take, for example, the enigmatic behavior of Eva
Peace, Sula's grandmother. Eva seems to display none of the qualities traditionally associated with the role of matriarch— gentleness, warmness, nurturing. Yet, if we view
Eva as unloving or harsh, we run the real danger of neglecting the fact that Eva faced the difficult economic times of the Depression and systematic white subjugation:
"Things was bad," Eva tells Hannah, and "niggers was dying like flies" (68). Conditions may have been bad for everyone during these lean years, but as Eva states, they were much worse for blacks. It is no wonder that Eva would resort to 67 amputating her own leg to save her children and her family, given the conditions she faced and her powerlessness to change those conditions through any less drastic action. The urgency of providing for her children, of giving them something more than three beets to eat, dictated that she take some action.
Demonstrating that oppression is at the heart of the violence in the Bottom has been the objective of many critics of Sula. And the oppression the community suffers can easily be attributed to the community's origins in a "nigger joke," even though the "nigger joke" that opens this novel acts merely as a metonymy for oppression by a white ruling class and does not name that oppression as the source of violence within the community. Proposing, as have other critics, that Sula is a novel without a "subject" in any traditional sense of a focal character, Robert Grant suggests that Morrison may be writing about "the organismic and microcosmic black community" (95). Grant agrees with other critics that focusing on the community means investigating the effects of white oppression within it. He writes:
Morrison's acknowledgements of white American racism's circumscription of black life are neither trumpeted nor elaborated. For instance, in the opening description of how the "Bottom" (the black section of Medallion where Sula is set) came to be created through a manipulative "nigger joke" (4-5), or in the depiction of the white bargeman's and sheriff's casual disregard for the corpse of a drowned black child (63-64) Morrison's glances at racism are presented with an almost delicate irony. (90)1
Despite this "delicate irony," the black community in the Bottom is nonetheless a victim of white oppression and. 68
as such, serves as a focal point for the novel. For Karen
Stein, Sula is an epic that "unlike many traditional epics .
. . begins with the razing of the Bottom to make room for a
whites-only golf course" (14 6). "This destruction," she
writes, "sets the book's tone of hovering doom, [and] is both example and symbol of the steady erosion that the black
community and its members suffer," an erosion that provides
Sula with its center. The economic and political powerlessness of the black community that Stein cites makes
it "vulnerable to white society's exploitative self- aggrandizement" (Stein 146). The community's suffering at the hands of white society translates into the self-sacrifice and self-destructiveness that Eva displays. Perhaps because
Morrison treats the influence of oppression on the community
ironically, we can more easily overlook it as the source of the pervasive and shocking violence in the community.
Maureen Reddy studies the effects that white racism and oppression have on individual residents of the Bottom.^
Shadrack's story, in Reddy's estimation, is a "modern slave narrative" which depicts the ways that war has robbed him of his "past, language, tribe, possessions" just as slavery robbed individuals of their identity and subjected them to
"social, political, and economic forces over which [they have] little control" (33). She describes Shadrack as a victim of the army which she labels as "the first of capitalism's modern industrial machines to incorporate black men" (31). The link exists then that allows us to lay blame 69
for the violent deaths and/or dysfunctions in the Bottom on white oppression.
Plum, Sula's brother, is also chewed up in the gears of the white society's machines of oppression, according to
Reddy. Instead of blaming Eva for Plum's death, she links it to his war experiences : "those horrors he experienced in war that drove him to seek oblivion through heroin" for his death
(31). Plum's self-annihilation through heroin is an attempt to return to the "comparatively safe childhood he so desperately desires" (Reddy 33). In fact, all the men in the Bottom are victims of systematic white oppression. Again, according to Reddy, Eva's husband. Boy Boy's very name
"places [him] outside of adult life . . . by echoing a racist epithet for adult black males; this name reminds the reader of the circumstances that entrap black men in an economic dependency that replicates childhood" (34).
However, violence among the residents of the Bottom stems not only directly from the economic oppression they suffer at the hands of their white oppressors, but also from their willingness to adopt the dominant culture's values and to align themselves with their oppressors. Like Boy Boy and
Shadrack— a WWI veteran and resident of the Bottom— Nel's husband, Jude's attempts to achieve manhood and rise above the degradation of his economic dependency by helping to build the New River Road are dashed because he is black
(Reddy 34). Reddy aligns Jude's marriage to Nel with the death of Nel's inner self, and asserts that it is merely an escape from one form of oppression to another: "Both have internalized the racist and sexist attitudes of the white 70
capitalist society that says that one's value as a man is
determined by one's work and by that work's economic rewards, including ownership of a woman and children, and that one's value as a woman is determined by one's ability to attract a man and to provide that man with children" (35). Along with most other members of the community, Nel Wright, Sula's best
friend and neighbor, provides a perfect example of the
community's willingness to conform to a set of standards
imposed from outside.
Some examples of violence within the black community in
Medallion are immediately recognizable as responses to white oppression. The incident between the young white boys and
Sula and Nel in which Sula mutilates herself to protect Nel graphically demonstrates how self-destructive those responses are in some cases. Oppressing blacks provides a sense of solidarity among members of the white community, in much the same way that blacks in the Bottom oppress members of their own community in order to release their own anger and frustration and to rid themselves of their own weaknesses.
In other words, scapegoating blacks, denouncing them, is a rite of passage into the community of whites in the valley below the Bottom. It is a way to belong to the community into which there is no other passage:
Four white boys in their early teens, sons of newly arrived Irish people, occasionally entertained themselves in the afternoon by harassing black schoolchildren. . . . As a matter of fact, baiting them [blacks] was the one activity that the white Protestant residents concurred in. In part their place in this world was secured only when they echoed the old residents' attitude toward blacks. (53) 71
Morrison points out here that the heriarchies within the white community, heirarchies which place the older residents above the newer ones, create violence that is passed on to the black community at the bottom of the heirarchy.
Sula's self-mutilation prefigures her role as a sacrificial victim:
Holding the knife in her right hand, she pulled the slate toward her and pressed her left forefinger down hard on its edge. Her aim was determined but inaccurate. She slashed off only the tip of her finger. The four boys stared open-mouthed at the wound and the scrap of flesh, like a button mushroom, curling in cherry blood that ran into the corners of the slate. (54)
The scene acts as a metonymy for the metaphor of the novel which depicts self-destructive violence as a response to white oppression.
Thus, the oppressive conditions created by the white society's treatment of the black community place that community in crisis. Moreover, the violence within the black community generated by that oppressive treatment leads ultimately to guilt and anger like that witnessed in Lorain in The Bluest Eye and to the community's search for a scapegoat. It is easy to see that Sula fits Girard's criteria for a scapegoat. Sula bears an unusual mark which is perhaps the most readily identifiable sign of the victim that Girard has taught us to identify. That her relative meaning to the community shifts according to the needs of those involved is apparent in the community's interpretation of the "birthmark that spread from the middle of the lid toward the eyebrow, shaped something like a stemmed rose. . . . The birthmark was to grow darker as the years passed, but novi it was the same 72 shade as her gold-flecked eyes, which, to the end, were as steady and clean as rain" (53).
In Girard's terms, this physical distinction sets Sula apart from birth, as does her birth into a family that conforms to few of the norms of the community. Though they are accepted as less than unusual, it is difficult not to consider the familial influences as extraordinary. For example, Sula's mother, Hannah, sleeps with most of the men in the town without trying to hide the fact from her daughter. And Sula's grandmother, Eva, takes in homeless waifs but refuses to give them individual names, insisting instead on calling them all by the same name. Sula herself returns to Medallion "accompanied by a plague of robins" (89) and to the townspeople "did not look her age. She was thirty and, unlike them, had lost no teeth, suffered no bruises, developed no ring of fat at the waist or pocket at the back of her neck" (115) .^ Sula seems immune to the common ravages of age and to the pains most commonly suffered by others: "It was rumored that she had had no childhood diseases, was never known to have chicken pox, croup or even a runny nose" (115) .
"Extreme characteristics," Girard writes, "ultimately attract collective destruction at some time or other, extremes not just of wealth or poverty, but also of success or failure, beauty and ugliness, vice and virtue, the ability to please and displease" {The Scapegoat 19) . In the eyes of the community, Sula possesses many of these extreme characteristics: "neither gnats nor mosquitoes would settle on her. Patsy, Hannah's one-time friend, agreed and said not 73
only that, but she had witnessed the fact that when Sula
drank beer she never belched" (115) . Sula's unusual physical characteristics, her family, and her other extreme
characteristics distinguish her from the rest of the
community, and even if most of it is imagined, or perhaps because most of it is imagined, it is an indication of the
community's propensity to raise to the level of the sacred that which is manifestly different among them.
Yet not all of what distinguishes Sula from the rest of
Medallion is imagined. Sula is guilty of some of the
"crimes" that bring about the disdain of the community.
Girard has identified the crimes of the victim, either real or imagined, that are most likely to determine the community's choice of a sacrificial victim:
First there are violent crimes which choose as object those people whom it is most criminal to attack, either in the absolute sense or in reference to the individual committing the act: a king, father, the symbol of supreme authority, and in biblical and modern societies the weakest and most defenseless, especially young children. Then there are sexual crimes: rape, incest, bestiality. The ones most frequently invoked transgress the taboos that are considered the strictest by the society in question. Finally, there are religious crimes, such as profanation of the host. Here, too, it is the strictest taboos that are transgressed. (The Scapegoat 15)
Sula manages to transgress in some way many of Medallion's taboos. Immediately upon her return to town, she places her grandmother Eva in a retirement home, claiming she was afraid to live in the same house with Eva after having witnessed her burn her own son. The town reacts with predictable disgust:
"When the word got out about Eva being put in Sunnydale, the 74 people in the Bottom shook their heads and said Sula was a roach" (112) .
Not only does Sula violate this custom of caring for the older members of the community, but the townspeople see her as a threat to their children. The incident with Teapot clearly demonstrates the community's ability to project their own weaknesses onto a suitable victim, one whom, as in Sula's case, is already the object of hatred and disgust. Teapot is described as the "five-year-old son of an indifferent mother, all of whose interests sat around the door of the Time and
Half Pool Hall" (113). Her name, "Teapot's Mamma," is given to her "because being his mamma was precisely her major failure" (113-114) . When Teapot breaks his arm on Sula's doorstep after having fallen down. Teapot's Mamma "told everybody that Sula had pushed him" (114) . The subsequent visit to the hospital reveals that "Teapot did have a fracture, although the doctor said poor diet had contributed substantially to the daintiness of his bones" (113-14).
Nonetheless, the community joins Teapot's Mamma in blaming
Sula for his injury. Finally, the town also blames Sula for the death of Mr. Finley, who, while sitting on his porch sucking chicken bones "looked up, saw Sula, choked on a bone and died on the spot" (114) .
Sula also manages to violate a series of sexual taboos, e.g., having sex with Nel's husband, Jude, which sets the town against her; "Later, when they saw how she took Jude, then ditched him for others, and heard how he bought a bus ticket for Detroit (where he bought but never mailed birthday cards to his sons), they forgot all about Hannah's easy ways 75
(or their own) and said she was a bitch" (112) . The narrator tells us that this incident along with the one with Teapot's
Mamina "cleared up the meaning of the birthmark over her eye;
it was not a stemmed rose, or a snake, it was Hannah's ashes marking her from the very beginning" (114) . Of course, all along Sula has incited the fury of the town's women by
sleeping with their husbands and then "discarding" them
(115) . Sula's own mother Hannah had also slept with many of the same women's husbands, but between Sula's and Hannah's treatment of the men, the community makes a somewhat arbitrary distinction, claiming that Hannah had been
"complimenting the women, in a way, by wanting their husbands. Sula was trying them out and discarding them without any excuse the men could swallow" (115) .
Sula finally violates the one sexual taboo most abhorrent to the community— she sleeps with white men:
Every one of them imagined the scene, each according to his own predilections— Sula underneath some white man— and it filled them with a choking disgust. There was nothing lower she could do, nothing filthier. The fact that their own skin color was proof that it had happened in their own families was no deterrent to their bile. Nor was the willingness of black men to lie in the beds of white women a consideration that might lead them toward tolerance. (113)
The truth of these accusations is never established, but that does not stop the community from condemning Sula anyway.
Sula also transgresses against the community's religion, and this is enough to make her suspicious in their eyes for all time. Sula comes to their church suppers without any underwear, only poking at the food and not complimenting anyone on their dishes; for this "they believed she was 76 laughing at their God" (114-15). For her religious transgressions, Sula is labeled a "devil" (117). What the townspeople interpret as her association with Shadrack permanently identifies her as evil for the town. Dessie claims to have witnessed a cordial interchange between Sula and Shadrack, whom they already considered mad, evil, and a
"reprobate" (117) . She claims that Shad tipped his hat to Sula, even though he doesn't wear one, violating the demonstrable truth that "Shadrack ain't civil to nobody"
(116). That Dessie discovers she has a sty on her eye when she returns home further confirms that she has witnessed evil; "That's cause you saw it," they tell her (117) .
Thus, Sula's independence, one of those distinctions that marks her as different from the rest of the Bottom's residents, also makes her the perfect scapegoat. Her refusal to bend to the norms and conventions of the community practically demands that she function as the scapegoat for a community that is already looking for a way to relieve the pressures of eking out an existence under their oppressor's gaze. Sula has already set herself apart by leaving Medallion and going to college and the big city. Her difference insists that she serve the role of cure for the town which she describes as "a half drawn-out disease" (96).
When Eva tells her she needs to settle down and "have some babies," Sula staunchly defends her right to follow her own path: "I don't want to make somebody else. I want to make myself" (92). As unconventional as Eva is by many standards, she is the first to try to fit Sula into a conventional role. 77
But Sula steadfastly demands that "whatever's burning in
[her] is [hers]" and that her life is her own to throw away
(93) .
The question remains, however, of what defines Sula's
role as a scapegoat and what effects, if any, her "sacrifice" has on the community. Having decided that Sula is evil, the
community coalesces against her, achieving a new unity through their decision to hate her: "Their conviction of
Sula's evil changed them in accountable yet mysterious ways.
Once the source of their personal misfortune was identified, they had leave to protect and love one another" (117) . Teapot's Mamma suddenly develops an interest in caring for her son and "became the most devoted mother: sober, clean, and industrious" (114) . The women of the town, frustrated by
Sula's refusal to treat their men properly, "cherished their men more, soothed the pride and vanity Sula had bruised"
(115). In general, hatred of Sula transforms the town in such a way that they begin to "protect their children, repair their homes, and in general band together against the devil in their midst" (117-18). "It was not for them to expel or annihilate [Sula]"; they need her as the object of their projection, as the force that will allow them to improve themselves. Few critics have failed to notice that Sula functions as the scapegoat for the Bottom, and as a vehicle for change within the residents of the Bottom's own l i v e s .^ For example, Karen Stein has argued that Sula's return to the
Bottom has "unexpectedly positive ramifications. . . . 78
Further, although Sula's quest appears to be a failure, her
return brings an unexpected, albeit short-lived, boon to the Bottom" (147). "Her blessing to the community," Stein
insists, "is achieved indirectly; it lies in the improved
behavior with which others respond to her presumed evil"
(149). Maureen Reddy claims that "the Bottom's people
indulge in self-hatred and self-blame when they make Sula a
pariah; scapegoating Sula is a very particular enactment of the multiple oppression of black women, as Sula is blamed for
the conditions under which she also suffers. Turning rage
inward, striking at the self or at those nearest to the self instead of at the real oppressor, is one possible, and extremely dangerous, response to oppression" (41). As we saw
in The Bluest Eye, the result of displacing rage is a
seemingly illimitable chain of violence that pursues yet can never find its rightful victim until the community faces its oppressors.
Most critics agree that Sula's effect on the community is a temporary one, and that any lasting change can only be effected by confronting the real source of their difficulties: the white society. Reddy astutely points out that "Sula is not, of course, the source of the townspeople's problems, but she is certainly a convenient scapegoat, and far easier to fight against than would be the complex, faceless, virtually unknowable social system of exclusion that oppresses them" (39). Moreover, Sula might be viewed as symbolic of the community's struggles to define itself, to create an identity for itself within the dominant society. It is ironic, though, that even while Sula is representative of 79
this impulse for self-definition, all her attempts are
squelched by the community's rigid standards for behavior.
In this schema, Nel, Sula's closest childhood friend,
becomes the representative of the white society, the
oppressors. Within the tangle of oppressor and oppressed,
the black woman, as always, is doubly oppressed by virtue of
being forced to bend to the domination of the ruling society
and the black male. Nel is unable to accept the violent
rejection of community values that Sula manages. Reddy
argues that there are three protagonists in the novel, Shadrack, Sula/Nel, and the residents of the Bottom. "The
community as a whole," Reddy continues, "enacts the recent
history of black people in the United States and represents
some possible responses to social otherness" (31). She
argues further that the Sula/Nel plot deals with, among other
things, "the effects of internalized racist stereotypes and
the multiple oppression of black women" (31) . Nel, who is
defined by her relationship to her husband and who is perhaps the most staunch defender of Medallion's values, assumes the
role of oppressor. Jude finds himself "taking shape in
[Nel's] eyes" (83); similarly, Nel finds purpose in being
"needed by someone" (83). Jude completes her and gives her an identity, albeit a false one: "She didn't even know she had a neck until Jude remarked on it, or that her smile was anything but the spreading of her lips until he saw it as a small miracle" (83). Following her break with Sula and
Jude's leaving, Nel slips deeper into her role as mother and defender of the faith, and finds that "virtue, bleak and drawn, was her only mooring" (139). Nel works, something 80 which Sula says "don't do nothing for [her]," she is home when her children return from school (139), and she tells Sula that she "can't act like a man . . . walking around all
independent-like, doing whatever you want" (142). Nel is
finally unable to see the value of Sula's struggle for self definition and asks her, "What have you got to show for it?"
(143). Placing her love for her man above the love of her
friend, something Nel has no doubt learned from her community, Nel cannot understand Sula's insistence that she
should have forgiven her for sleeping with her husband on the grounds that they had been the closest of friends: "If we were such good friends," Sula asks, "how come you couldn't get over it?" (145) .
Nel's willingness to condemn Sula, to treat her unfairly, and to stereotype her demonstrates her inability to reject, as Sula has, the values and standards of the community. Eva, in many regards, might be seen as rebellious in the same way that Sula is, though she too becomes a representative for community standards, suggesting that Sula conform and "settle down." Sula remarks that Nel has sold out to the straight-laced mores of the community: "So she walk on down that road, her back so straight in that old green coat, the strap of her handbag pushed back all the way to the elbow, thinking how much I have cost her" (147) .
Nel's rejection of Sula becomes an act of violence as surely as does the white society's oppression of the people of Medallion, as surely as does the oppression of the black woman by the black male. With Nel's' guidance, perhaps Sula might have avoided some pitfalls; with her love and 81
friendship, perhaps she might have grown more complete, more
fulfilled, and have learned the value of connectedness within self-definition.
The relief that hating Sula brings Medallion is short
lived, essentially because as a scapegoat, Sula stands in the place of the white community, those truly responsible for the violence in and dissolution of the community. Sula's death,
"the best news folks up in the Bottom had had since the promise of work at the tunnel," is followed by bleak reminders that the situation in the community hasn't changed simply because they had temporarily found relief in persecuting her (150) . At first it appears that "because Sula was dead or just after she was dead a brighter day was dawning" (151). Evidence suggests to the residents of the Bottom that things are turning around for them, yet there is still the reminder that the black community is subject to the economic oppression of the white community; the River Road tunnel holds out the promise of an economic windfall: "in spite of the fact that the River Road leading to the tunnel had encouraged similar hopes [three years earlier] in 1927 but had ended up being built entirely by white labor" (151) .
The renovation of an old folks' home to which many elderly blacks would be transferred also inspires hope in the community. However, when "late one afternoon, a rain fell and froze . . . and held for days," momentous natural portents wrangle the edges of their keenest hopes (151) . The destruction from the ice storm means hardships for the entire community since "late harvesting things were ruined, of course, and fowl died of both chill and rage" (152) : "The 82
consequence of all that ice was a wretched Thanksgiving of tiny tough birds, heavy pork cakes, and pithy sweet potatoes"
(152). The community, suddenly finds itself "housebound," with no means of acquiring "vital foodstuffs," and losing wages because they "could not make it down the icy slopes"
(152). Worse yet, the cold weather makes them all sick: "By the time the ice began to melt . . . everybody under fifteen had croup, or scarlet fever, and those over had chilblains, rheumatism, pleurisy, earaches and a world of other ailments"
(152-53) . Typically, Morrison depicts a landscape that seems vindictive and malevolent, especially toward the black community. But, the natural disasters are also suggestive as well of a disruption in the natural order— the reflection of an oppressive system. The narrator tells us, however, that rather than relief,
Sula's death is accompanied by even greater hardships, that in spite of her death and the role she plays as a scapegoat, the community must still deal with the real problem: "As soon as the silvering began, long before the cider cracked the jugs, there was something wrong. A falling away, a dislocation was taking place. Hard on the heels of the general relief that Sula's death brought a restless irritability took hold" (153). Moreover, following Sula's death violence within the community flairs up again: wives
"uncoddled their husbands" and children "returned to a steeping resentment of the burdens of old people," old people who were well cared for in reaction to Sula's treatment of
Eva (154). Teapot's Mamma "beat him as she had not done since Sula knocked him down the steps. . . . Other mothers 83
who had defended their children from Sula's malevolence . . .
now had nothing to rub against. The tension was gone and so
was the reason for the effort they had made" (153) .
Embroiled in violence, the great equalizer, the community
remains undifferentiated— among other differences, the difference between victims and victimizers remains collapsed among the members of the community. Sula is victimized by
those who are themselves victims of white persecution; all partake in the cycle of violence. Both before and after
Sula, the "whole cultural structure seems on the verge of
collapse" {Violence and the Sacred 49). Indeed, until the white community releases its grip on the black community, provides relief from institutionalized oppression, the
community will remain violent. Violence may still persist
since the community has now "learned" to persecute its own as a way of purging frustration and anger. A direct result of the poor conditions in which the residents of the Bottom struggle, the foul weather produces illness, and illness produces "small-spiritedness" within the community (154).
Still, their oppressors tempt and tantalize them with the promise of economic relief, although "even a definite and witnessed interview of four colored men . . . at the tunnel
site could not break the cold vise of that lean and bitter year's end" (154).
Though Sula does serve as a scapegoat for the community, her death is in no way a sacrifice according to Girard's criteria. If it were we would expect the differences— especially in social status, gender, victim and victimizer— among the members of the community to be restored, the 84 natural outcome of the sacrifice. The renewal of violence within the community testifies to the inefficacy of her role as scapegoat to do more than temporarily forestall conflict.
We might expect that Sula's "sacrifice" would have a noticeably positive effect, because, unlike Pecola Breedlove, Sula is a victim of the entire community. Their condemnation of her seems unanimous; the community is unified against her.
However, in terms of their roles as both victim and victimizer, it appears that difference remains collapsed.
Eventually, the ice does begin to break, though the change in weather simply signals further disaster for the community. Within days of the ice storm and bitter December weather, there are "drab patches of grass . . . in the fields"; this disorder in the natural system pushes the community to the breaking point. They react to National
Suicide Day— Shadrack's annual appeal to the community to attempt to defeat the unexpectedness of death— as they never had before, by forming "a pied piper's band behind Shadrack"
(159). The reaction of those who fall in behind Shadrack on
National Suicide Day is understandable only in relation to the steadily increasing pace of deterioration of their condition. The narrator attributes their reaction to
Shadrack on this particular National Suicide Day to a need to gain control and to find relief:
As the initial group of about twenty people passed more houses, they called to the people standing in doors and leaning out of windows to join them; to help them open further this slit in the veil, this respite from anxiety, from dignity, from gravity, from the weight of that very adult pain that had undergirded them all those years before. Called to them to come out and play in the sunshine . . . as though there really was hope. The same hope that . . . kept them convinced that some 85
"magic" government was going to lift them up, out and away from that dirt, those beans, those wars. (159-60)
As the community reaches a deeper level of suffering, as collapse seems increasingly inevitable, and as violence seems to escalate beyond their control— scapegoating Sula seems to have exerted little influence on escalating violence within the community— the community turns to New River Tunnel as a target for their venom, their vengeance. The Tunnel symbolizes for them the pain and suffering they have withstood under the rule of the white man's iron fist. As the crowd led by Shadrack reaches the tunnel,
their hooded eyes swept over the place where their hope had lain since 1927. There was the the promise; leaf- dead. The teeth unrepaired, the coal cut off, the chest pains unattended, the school shoes unbought, the rush- stuffed mattress, the broken toilets, the leaning porches, the slurred remarks and the staggering childish malevolence of their employers. All there in blazing sunlit ice rapidly becoming water. (161)
The tunnel and the River Road are palpable symbols of their oppression, hard-edged reminders of the community's white oppressors' refusal to let them be human, to have lives and jobs. Attacking the tunnel fulfills the community's
"need to to kill it all, all of it, to wipe from the face of the earth the work of the thin-armed Virginia boys, the bull necked Greeks and the knife-faced men who waved the leaf-dead promise (161-62). The collapse of the River Road tunnel seems a natural disaster, brought on as it is by the warming earth and slipping ice. It seems to be yet another expression of the "natural order" and its hatred for them, an expression of the power of that order over them. Directing their vengeance toward this symbol of their white oppressors' 86
abuse of their people seems an attempt to stop victimizing
each other and to address the source of the violence.
However, it is not unanimously sanctioned violence; the act of aggression is approved by only the more "aggressive and abandoned" from among the community's residents. Thus, even though it appears to be the one act of collective violence, directed toward a symbolic victim, that might free them from the plague of reciprocal violence, the violence toward the
Tunnel is yet another act of reciprocal violence, a repetition taking place in the symbolic realm, as Brooks would say, in the realm of the transference. Though it is only a symbolic act, the attack on the
Tunnel seems to redirect aggression toward a more appropriate target. However, it is as if the very order of things would not allow them even this small, symbolic victory over their oppressors. It is as if nature were in league with the white man to turn their aggression into suicide, for the tunnel swallows many of Shadrack's followers. Does Morrison mean to suggest that the system is so deeply ingrained that even united against it they cannot overcome it? Does she mean to suggest that their violence must be unequivocally unanimous if it is to be effective? Or does she mean to say that the force of the community's violence is hopelessly inadequate for combatting so powerful and deeply entrenched a threat?
Finally, is Morrison suggesting that violence is an inappropriate response?
The chapter entitled "1965" begins with the narrator's assertion that "things were so much better in 1965," though when Nel is reminded of the deweys by the "look" of the 87
"young people in the dime store with the cash register keys around their necks," we immediately suspect that perhaps
"things" are not so much better after all, a suspicion Nel eventually confirms (163). There aren't as many "beautiful boys" now, she thinks, and "even the whores were better then: tough, fat, laughing women with burns on their cheeks and wit married to their meanness," not these "pale and dull" modern whores (164). The town kept building "old people's homes":
"every time they built a road they built a old folks' home,"
Nel observes (164). Still, compared to the whites in town,
"it took a lot for black people to let them go" (164) . Finally, Nel confesses that "in the meantime the Bottom had collapsed," and that the whites had reclaimed the land that once was so devalued in their eyes that they had to trick the blacks into taking it (165). The land is too expensive for the black people to own now, "even if they wanted to" (166) .
The economic power the whites wield over the blacks is firmly in place— very little is better than it was before and the
Bottom that was once a "real place" is now simply another place (166). Oppression, institutionalized and more difficult to detect because of small outward improvements—
"colored people [worked] in the dime stores" and a "colored man taught mathematics at the junior high school" (162)— remains firmly in place and ultimately dismantles the Bottom.
Nonetheless, the community of blacks in the Bottom is at least in part responsible for its own destruction. Girard has observed that outside pressure on the community can lead to a chain of violence that finally results in a kind of
"social suicide" {Violence and the Sacred 53). Girard 88
introduces the notion that it is possible for the society to
succumb to pressure from an outside source, stating that it is at least worth examining whether or not in some cases the
"self-destruction [is] not ultimately due to the pressure of
a foreign culture. Even if this were the case, cyclical
violence still presents a threat to any society, whether or
not it is under pressure from a foreign culture or from any
other external interference. The process is basically internal" (Violence and the Sacred 53). Thus, the destruction of the community, which is at the heart of this novel, results from internal struggles instigated from outside. Collapse of the community seems nearly complete at this point in the novel, though the community has scapegoated
Sula and attempted to strike out at the symbols of its oppressors.
Furthermore, we have not yet escaped the plot, nor has the novel named or reexperienced the original trauma outside of the realm of the transference. The plot of Sula drives forward relentlessly following the first National Suicide Day catastrophe at the New River Tunnel. We would expect that striking out at the white oppressors would lead to escape from plot, if indeed the metaphor at the heart of this novel is the dynamics of whites versus blacks that we saw in The
Bluest Eye. However, because the plot continues, because the wound remains open, refusing to heal, we are forced to consider alternatives and to continue searching for the cure from plot. What we must find is an event that fulfills criteria on two levels— the social and the narratological. A collective act of violence directed toward a surrogate victim 89 would reinflate the metaphor of the community, restore difference among the members of the community, and effect an escape from the cycle of reciprocal violence, if only a temporary escape.
As we have seen, no collective act of violence was apparent in The Bluest Eye. Instead, release from violence occurs only individually for Claudia, who realizes that until the system of white oppression is removed, the community will remain entangled in violence. Her realization manifests her escape from the cycle of reciprocal violence and, thus, escape from plot on the narrative level. Claudia's anagnorisis restores narrative difference in the sense that it returns us to time present or at least the historical present of the narrator. It is an act of violence, if we consider it an eruption into consciousness of a repressed awareness. Moreover, it is the crucial narratological event, for it effectively restores the metaphor at the heart of the novel, though a more complete restoration of meaning might, in some ways, be more desirable. To the extent that it enables Claudia to escape Pecola's fate, to leave behind her the community's self-destructive tendencies, the event is a narrative and social sacrifice, a purification. Violence ends for Claudia and the novel because the cycle of repressed memories of a trauma will cease, eruptions into consciousness of painful memories will end because the trauma has been named. What constitutes this escape for Sula ? What kinds of narrative difference exist? If the attack on the bridge does not constitute or achieve escape for the community and 90
the novel, what will? Discovering the event that enables escape will lead us to the metaphor of the novel.
Linda Wagner frequently makes reference to the repetition of patterns in Morrison's novels, especially The
Bluest Eye and Sula. Wagner notices that not only is
National Suicide Day a recurrent motif in the novel, but also that Morrison repeats the "metaphor[s] of confinement, possession, security" (198). Wagner writes that the narrative structure of Sula echoes the non-linear pattern of
"most of Life," especially in its repetition of images like "the recurrence of Eva, the repetition of burning fatalities, the circles surrounding Chicken Little's disappearance, the balls, eyes, [and] suns" (199). That these images are images of violence or involve violence remind us that the narrative world Morrison creates or the real world that her narrative fictions describe are subsumed by violence. More important, however, through the repetition of images, the narrative structure of Sula emerges as a pattern of repression and release, as the narrative of secrets withheld and breaking into consciousness. It is the gaps, the missing pieces, including missing parts and/or explanations unoffered that make us feel that a secret is in control here.
Until the close of the novel and the reenactment of trauma, we fill in Sula's gaps with further repetitions, such as the story of Shadrack. Sula keeps the story of Shadrack in the margins, and even though National Suicide Day is an institution, for the better part of the year it occupies a position in the corner of the characters' minds. Shadrack's relationship to Sula is unique, simply because it is the only 91 relationship he has with anyone within the community that he considers a friendship. Shadrack must be viewed as a character trying to maintain control; however, his attempts to control the unexpectedness of death necessarily involve violence. In fact. National Suicide Day is an overt call to self-destruction. The holiday for Shadrack is both a way to gain control over death and to achieve permanency. Shadrack, through his traumatic experiences during the war, becomes another victim of the white society, as I have mentioned above. He attempts to repress his trauma, through drinking mainly, and by maintaining orderliness. His is a desire for order— in addition to National Suicide Day, witness the spartan neatness and cleanliness of his cabin and slash mark calendar. He remains isolated from the community as a result, though he is, in some ways, inextricably tied to it.
We can't imagine him existing outside of Medallion. Members of his community remain isolated from, yet inextricably bound to, each other in much the same way. Shadrack is tied to the community through his desire to help them, as the narrator puts it, through the love he feels for them, and perhaps through his identification with them as victims like himself of the same system. The memory of Sula's "visit"— Shadrack calls her his "visitor"— also provides him with a kind of benchmark and a sense of connectedness with another human being, if not the community. The community, Shadrack, and
Sula all share the struggle to create an identity within the oppressive system that struggles to deny them their right to be who they want to be. 92
But Shadrack chooses a violent and self-destructive method of trying to achieve victory over death. His cause is a hopeless one, his method destined to produce disastrous consequences. Again, Shadrack's method links him to the community, for their means of achieving victory over something more powerful than themselves is to resort to self destructive violence, although to a degree it is certainly less conscious than Shadrack of what they are doing. The community's enemy (which is ultimately Shadrack's as well) is just as indomitable. Sula's death has a very different effect on Shadrack than it does on the residents of the Bottom. Realizing that
Sula has died, that she will not have the permanence that his
"always" promised her, Shadrack, who is already beginning to feel lonely and to forget that he had ever forgotten anything, begins to feel his loneliness and his lack of connectedness. The order he has created in his daily life begins to collapse: "the messier his house got, the lonelier he felt" (156). Sula's death, then, effects a transformation in Shadrack. Memories of his disorder, his trauma, fight their way ever closer to the surface. He finds it more and more difficult "to conjure up sergeants, and orderlies, and invading armies; harder and harder to hear the gunfire and keep the platoon marching in time" (156). In other words, until Sula's death, calling up these memories has helped him to repress memories of the "falling away of skin, the drip and slide of blood, and the exposure of bone underneath"
(157). Feelings of loneliness and isolation are symptoms 93 that difference is reestablishing itself within his consciousness. Rather than repressing all his memories, rather than burying all his memories and all his pain in the unconscious, Shadrack begins to differentiate between those memories— some remain unconscious while others burst, raging, into consciousness. In the narrator's words, Shadrack "had improved enough to feel lonely" (155). Shadrack's pain is the pain of blood returning to numbed nerve endings.
The reinfusion of blood in Shadrack's bloodless limbs, his painful working through of repressed memories of a violent trauma, is an example of how returns of the repressed drive Morrison's narrative in Sula. In The Bluest Eye
Morrison employs a narrative pattern that disrupts a straight chronological progression, a pattern of jerks and starts, slippages and recoveries of a linear pattern. This recursive pattern is determined by the interruptions of forward-moving plot by eruptions into the narrative of repressed material.
As Linda Wagner observes, it is a method that moves plot forward "on several fronts simultaneously," although I would argue that plot is not simply moving forward, for the "detours" in plot are movements forward and backward at the same time. The same pattern is evident in Sula where chapters headed by years do not recount the events of that year but circle back to a time before, returning to the origins of the events in the present time that the chapters eventually r e c a l l . ^ Chapters often use as focal points events that take place in the year that gives the chapter its title, but in many cases, at least in the first sections of 94
the novel, there is a curious return to origins, a recursive
backtracking that waylays the forward movement of the plot,
explaining character and motivation, recalling repressed and
painful memories without which the plot could not move
forward. These are invariably traumatic experiences, and
they seemingly burst into the consciousness of the novel.
These interruptions are psychological, narratological, and,
in some cases, physical returns of the repressed that move the narrative toward a restoration of the metaphor of the
novel.
For example, the chapter entitled "1921" recounts Eva's history, beginning when Sula is not yet born, when most of
Eva's children are still very young. It describes the
suffering undergone through abuse from her husband. Boy Boy, and the consequences of his abandonment, including the
Depression and Plum's illness. The chapter chronicles Eva's postponement of her anger at Boy Boy for having left her;
"But the demands of feeding her children were so acute that she had to postpone her anger for two years until she had both the time and the energy for it" (32). These events take place in a relatively distant past, removed from 1921. In part they are simply flashbacks that we expect in most novels, character development that is essential for the novel. However, the chapter has promised to introduce Sula— it opens, "Sula Peace lived in a house of many rooms that had been built over a period of five years to the specifications of its owner, who kept on adding things"— a promise that it never fulfills. Instead, Morrison introduces the other tenants of the house, recalls Boy Boy's insults to Eva on a 95
trip back to Medallion, and finally builds to a climatic
scene in which Eva burns Plum in his bed. Characters introduced are essential ones, including Sula's mother,
Hannah. Nonetheless, the chapter works its way through a
series of painful memories, namely memories of Eva's hard
life and the rough treatment she has received at the hands of black men and the white community, until the final scene with
Plum, in itself an event that, as we have seen, is a repetition of the original trauma, the subjugation of the black community by the white society. Eva's treatment of
Plum demonstrates as well how violence perpetrated against her translates into violence that she perpetrates against other members of her own community.
In fact, memories surging to the surface of the novel, interrupting linear narrative progression, involve violence of one sort or another, but most frequently a kind of self- destructiveness engendered through oppression. Eva's sacrifice of her leg "repeats" the self-destructiveness evident when Sula cuts off the end of her finger to "save"
Nel and to circumvent the threat from the Irish boys, even though chronologically Eva loses her leg first. The chapter entitled "1920" also detours to recall events that repeat the trauma, events that can be viewed as metonymic substitutions for the violence of white oppression. The events also demonstrate how violence visited from outside on the black community creates antagonism within the black community, the by now familiar self-destructive response. Though it suggests through its title that it will deal with events in
1920, the chapter begins by describing how Helene Wright came 96
to Medallion and met her husband. It also describes how
Helene subjugated her daughter, Nel, attempting to shape her according to values she had adopted from the dominant
culture, a powerfully destructive tendency whose invariably
disastrous results are chronicled in The Bluest Eye; in Sula,
Helene tells Nel, "Don't just sit there, honey, you could be pulling your nose," pulling it to make it straighter and more
like the nose of a white girl (28). Like Geraldine with Louis, Jr., Helene Wright wants to squelch any hint of
individuality or African heritage in Nel, to suppress any
attempts on her part at self-definition: "Under Helene's hand the girl became obedient and polite. Any enthusiasms that
little Nel showed were calmed by her mother until she drove
her daughter's imagination underground" (18). Helene's
treatment of Nel repeats metonymically the relationship between not only Nel and Sula, Eva and Sula, Sula and
Medallion, but also the relationship between the white
community and black community.
Morrison's chapters demonstrate how the erasure of
Girardean difference takes place on both a narrative and a
sociological level. On the narrative level, difference between time present and time past is effaced. The chapter
titles intimate that they will describe events taking place
in a particular year, yet they recall earlier events, only gradually building to events in the novel's present tense.
The pattern collapses both time and event. Events taking place in the past come to resemble events taking place in the present, thus emphasizing their status as repetitions of an original trauma. Because violence within the community 97
repeats an original trauma— white society's violent
oppression of black society— difference between the races is
also collapsed. Violence visited on blacks, who are
initially victims only, transforms them into victimizers of their own people, thereby creating a sameness between them and the white community, who are now both victimizers. Thus, according to Girard and Brooks, resolution in the novel
should restore both social and narrative difference.
The chapter "1920" does finally return us to incidents taking place in 1920. However, the events recalled remain substitutions of an original trauma and are symptomatic of the novel's attempts to return to origins. In 1920, Helene
Wright must return to New Orleans, the place she struggled so desperately to escape. Her return to her birthplace and to a meeting with the profligate mother she has rejected is a physical return of the repressed for Helene and the novel.
It is the painful resurgence into her life of all that from which she has worked so hard to distance herself. First,
Helene and Nel must enter the "coach pointed out to them by the colored porter," though they finally end up in "a coach peopled by some twenty white men and women" (20). When the white porter calls Helene "gal" and humiliates her by telling her to "git your butt on in [the colored people's coach],"
Helene smiles at him (20). The black passengers on the train are "stricken" by the "stretch of [Helene's] foolish smile"
(22). The humiliation she suffers clearly portrays an isolated incident within a larger system of oppression. Yet it also demonstrates the antagonisms within the black community itself. When Nel meets her grandmother, Rochelle, 98
Helene's anger at being subjugated in general helps to fuel her hatred of her own mother: "All the while Helene and Nel watched her. The one in a rage at the folded leaves she had endured, the wooden benches she had slept on, all to miss
seeing her grandmother and seeing instead that painted canary who never said a word of greeting or affection" (26). Seeing
Helene's mother in this physical return of the repressed defines exactly what it is that Helene struggles so desperately to repress in her daughter. It is no less than the impulse to define the self according to individual
standards and apart from community-dictated values. Nel Wright's fledging attempts to define herself
"repeat" the attempts of the black community around her. On her return to Medallion, Nel discovers that she is different, that she is an individual: "I'm me. I'm not their daughter.
I'm not Nel. I'm me. Me" (28). The drive to follow her own course will eventually be weakened by her mother and by both the white and the black society's demands on her to conform.
For Anna Shamon, Sula is a "nostalgic look at a black community unable to exist in the definition of a white
society; in fact, Morrison allows her characters to flaunt their differences and shows through Sula that 'self definition must precede social responsibility'" (qtd. in
Wagner 200). I would argue with Shamon to the extent that characters who "flaunt their differences" find themselves outcast from the society, cut off from social responsibility.
Those who conform, who repress or erase their differences, are embraced by the community. Nonetheless, the community is
struggling to define itself, though it punishes those who 99 struggle for self-definition as individuals. Nel and Sula's examples demonstrate how the novel repeats this struggle, and how the name of those individuals within both the black and white communities who oppose this self-definition of both community and individuals is never spoken. The relationship between Eva and the deweys also repeats the relationship of oppressor to oppressed. The deweys are taken in by Eva, who, "operating on a private scheme of preference and prejudice," regularly took in needy children
"whose circumstances she had heard about" (37). Giving three separate children the same name denies them individuality and the chance for self-definition; to Eva and consequently to everyone else, "they's all deweys" (38). As a result of this namelessness, of "joining with the other two to become a trinity with a plural name," the deweys eventually lose their separate identities, "becoming in fact as well as name a dewey" (38). Denied their individuality, the deweys become
"inseparable, loving nothing and no one but themselves" (38).
Representative of the oppressed, all difference is erased among the deweys until "they spoke with one voice, thought with one mind" (39). The deweys even played "chain gang," tying their shoelaces together in a macabre exhibition of their destiny as a second class. The deweys' case echoes not only Sula's relationship to the community in Medallion but also the community's relationship to their white oppressors.
The battle to win self-definition, to forge an identity, meets with disastrous results— the collapse of difference for individuals and conflict within the community. The blending of narrative points of view throughout the novel also 100
constitutes a kind of narrative collapse of difference, the
kind of collapse represented by the recursive chronological
structure. A good example lies in the final chapter. The
chapter opens in a third-person voice, "Things were so much
better in 1965. Or so it seemed. You could go downtown and
see colored people working in the dime store. . . . They were
so different, these young people. So different from the way
she remembered them forty years ago" (163) . Immediately the narrative shifts into a slightly different voice, a report
directly from the consciousness of Nel. The language and the
point of view of the observations, so clearly marked by Nel's biases and the nuances of her speech patterns, signal the
shift: "Jesus, there were some beautiful boys in 1921! Look
like the whole world was bursting at the seams with them.
Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old. Jesus, they were
fine" (163) .
Similar blendings of narrative voices and point of view
take place throughout the novel, signaling a narrative
crisis. When Nel discovers Jude and Sula together, she
reacts in the first person: "I am just standing here. They
are not doing that. I am just standing here and seeing it, but they are not really doing it" (105). Suddenly, in the
next paragraph, the point of view shifts to third person.
But the shift is not a complete one; the third-person here is
still characterized by character-specific idiosyncrasies of
speech and thought: "The clock was ticking. Nel looked at it
and realized that it was two-thirty, openly forty-five minutes before the children would be home and she hadn't felt anything right or sensible and now there was no time or 101
wouldn't be until nighttime when they were asleep and she
could get into bed and maybe she could do it then" (106). In her relationship with Ajax, Sula experiences her most
focused desires to understand what gives individuals their
individuality, their differences. The passages describing her lovemaking with Ajax involve another kind of narrative
collapse, a shift from third-person to first-person. In
these instances, Sula imagines that she can physically dig
down into Ajax to discover the secret of his being. From the
third-person narration, the narrative slips into passages
where Sula's secret desires to tear into Ajax emerge: Letting her thoughts dwell on his face in order to confine, for just a while longer, the drift of flesh toward the high silence of orgasm. If I take a chamois and rub real hard on the bone, right on the ledge of your cheek bone, some of the black will disappear. It will flake away into the chamois and underneath there will be gold leaf. I can see it shining through the black. I know it is there
How high she was over his wand-lean body, how slippery was his sliding sliding smile. (130; Morrison's italics and ellipses)
For Sula to succumb to the desire for "possession," for
it is "not love, but possession or at least the desire for
it" that Sula comes to feel with Ajax, a significant
difference between the remainder of the community and her vanishes. Sula finds herself in the position of oppressor and Ajax in the role of the oppressed, a situation that Ajax
immediately recognizes is intolerable for him. As if to remind us of this basic formula for relationships in the community, interjected info the narrative of Ajax and Sula and their last night together is the story of Tar Baby. Ajax 102
has been arraigned for interfering at the jail where Tar Baby
has been beaten, complaining that "it ain't right . . . to
let a grown man lay around in his own shit" (133) . The policeman responds with a typically racist attitude: "The policeman, obviously in agreement with Eva, who maintained
that Tar Baby was white, said that if the prisoner didn't
like to live in shit, he should come down out of those hills,
and live like a decent white man" (133) . The result of the
argument between Ajax and the police is "an appointment to
appear in civil court Thursday next" (133). On the heels of
this narrative, itself a repetition of and a substitute for the metaphor of the novel, Ajax recognizes that Sula's
attitude toward him has changed and that, as a result, he
will leave her for good, first making "love to her with the
steadiness and intensity of a man about to leave for Dayton"
(134). With Ajax gone, Sula comes to the conclusion that she
has "sung all the songs there are" (137). In her desire to possess Ajax, Sula joins the company of oppressors,
abdicating her desire for self-definition and seeking,
instead, definition through an Other.
But before Sula can die, the novel attempts once more to
escape plot by naming the trauma that has erupted into the
narrative of Medallion. Yet the narrative offers only
another repetition and not a reenactment of the original
trauma—Nel and Sula simply try to lay blame on each other,
arguing over their responsibilities to each other and whether
or not Sula or Nel is to blame for the dissolution of their
friendship. The conflict appears to revolve around Sula's behavior with Jude who Sula claims she only "fucked": "I 103
didn't kill him, I just fucked him. If we were such good
friends, how come you couldn't get over it?" (145). However,
the real dispute seems to emerge when Sula asks Nel why she
feels so certain that she has behaved properly or in the
"right" way; Sula asks "How you know?
. . . About who was good. How you know it was you?" (14 6) .
With this difference between herself and the community
effaced, and the relative guilt for Chicken Little's death
shared between Nel and Sula, Sula dies: "While in this state of weary anticipation, she noticed that she was not breathing, that her heart had stopped completely. . . . She was not breathing because she didn't have to. Her body no
longer needed oxygen. She was dead" (14 9) .
It soon becomes apparent, however, that the conflict has
just as much to do with the secret of Chicken Little's death and who bears the responsibility for it or who acted in the most responsible manner afterward. Nel has claimed that
"talking [to Sula] about right and wrong was like talking to the deweys" and that "Sula couldn't give a right answer because she didn't know" (145). Neither Nel nor Sula recognizes the pressures that have affected their relationship, or understands the dynamics of oppressor and oppressed, although Sula is conscious that she has struggled to define herself and that her struggle has placed her at odds with her own community and her best friend. Thus, the trauma that remains as the driving force of the novel remains obscured, as yet unnamed.
Just before her death, Sula seems to identify the nature of the crisis in an enigmatic passage in which she describes 104
the dissolution of difference within the community;
Oh, they'll love me all right. It will take time, but they'll love me. . . . After all the old women have lain with the teen-agers; when all the young girls have slept with their drunken old uncles; after all the black men fuck all the white ones; when all the white women kiss all the black ones; when the guards have raped all the jailbirds and after all the whores make love to their grannies; after all the faggots get their mothers' trim; when Lindbergh sleeps with Bessie Smith and Norma Shearer makes it with Stepin Fetchit; after all the dogs have fucked all the cats and every weathervane on every barn flies off the roof to mount the hogs . . . then there'll be a little love left over for me. And I'll know just what it will feel like. (146; my ellipses)
René Girard writes that "acts of violence gradually wear away
the differences that exist not only in the same family but throughout the community" {Violence and the Sacred 48). He defines the sacrificial crisis as a "crisis of distinctions— that is, a crisis affecting the cultural order. This cultural order is nothing more than a regulated systme of distinctions in which the differences among indivduals are used to establish their 'identity' and their mutual
relationships" (49). Sula predicts the escalation of the crisis of difference in the future. Hers is an apocalyptic vision of escalating violence and the elimination of difference on all levels. Facing the full intensity of this
level of crisis, the community will remember the positive, if only temporary, effects that joining together to hate Sula brought about. In one sense, Sula has named the trauma, the dissolution of difference that escalating violence produces.
It is a revelation for Sula that signals the beginning of the end of plot for her. Following closely on the heels of her pronouncement, Sula confronts memories of one crucial event 105
from her past, experiencing it in its full urgency. Thinking of herself, her lack of remorse for her mother's death
surfaces inexplicably, irrepressible no longer:
Nothing was ever different. They were all the same. . . . That's the same sun I looked at when I was twelve, the same pear trees. If I live a hundred years my urine will flow the same way, my armpits and breath will smell the same. My hair will grow from the same holes. I didn't mean anything. I stood there watching her burn and was thrilled. I wanted her to keep on jerking like that, to keep on dancing. (147)
Sula dies dreaming of the Clabber girl, "smiling and beckoning to her, one hand under her apron" (147) . As a symbol of a "choking" whiteness, the Clabber Girl is simultaneously attractive and suffocating; Sula is overcome as she tries to stuff her pockets with her "slippery starchiness" (147-48). As metonymy, the passage reiterates Sula's abdication. Emerging as it does in a dream, the passage convinces us that Sula is experiencing a traumatic reenactment of her crises. Through this series of reenactments and incorporations of the past into the present,
Sula escapes plot.
Sula knows "what it will feel like" to be loved because she has already experienced what it feels like to be her community's scapegoat, to be simultaneously held sacred and despised. Perhaps she feels that she will be revered after she has died, that her role as scapegoat will be appreciated more fully later, when the community faces the full intensity of the crisis of difference. In any event, Sula's death marks the end of her struggle for self-definition and the triumph of the community's struggles to repress her. Her death and her pronouncement of the ensuing crisis toward 105
which the community is headed prefigure the destruction of
the community and the failure of its struggles to create an identity and to break free of the rule of white oppressors.
Sula's "always" seems to predict that the community's crisis will be interminable (149) .
The novel's final chapter begins by asserting that
"things were so much better in 1965" (163), when, in fact, it
chronicles the complete disappearance of difference within
the community. In this chapter, the Bottom becomes the top.
The white people have moved into the Bottom and "everybody
[every black] who had made money during the war moved as close as they could to the valley" (165). The whites in the
community continue to subjugate the blacks, taking their land now according to their needs to build television towers and golf courses; "Just like that, they had changed their minds and instead of keeping the valley floor to themselves, now they wanted a hilltop house with a river and ring of elms"
(166). Even the differences that distinguish Eva from other women have been effaced: "Nel wanted to cry . . . for the once proud foot accustomed for over half a century to fine well-laced shoe, [is] now stuffed gracelessly into a pink terrycloth slipper" (167). Moreover, violence is manifest in the people's, both white and black, willingness to "[put] their old ones away" (164). Nel comments that "every time they built a road, they built a old folks' home" (164) . Nel acknowledges that the community had "collapsed" altogether, though she demonstrates little awareness that the demise of 107
the community is the inevitable outcome of white oppression,
of the white community's refusal to allow it to survive
(165).
However, it is at this point that the text begins to move toward closure. The crisis reaches a kind of narrative
critical mass as shifts between time present and time past and between narrative voices come at a heightened pace.
Narrative sacrifice that incorporates the "past as past" within the text seems increasingly inevitable. When Eva
Peace jogs open the bright place in Nel's mind, Nel recalls the total disregard with which the residents of the Bottom
responded to Sula's death:
Eva was mean. Sula had even said so. Feeble-minded or not. Old. Whatever. Eva knew what she was doing. Always had. She had stayed away from Sula's funeral and accused Nel of drowning Chicken Little for spite. The same spite that galloped all over the Bottom, that made every gesture an offense, every off-center smile a threat, so that even the bubbles of relief that broke in the chest of practically everybody when Sula died did not soften their spite and allow them to go to Mr. Hodges' funeral parlor or send flowers from the church or bake a yellow cake. (171-72)
The "spite" of the community results in Nel being the "only black person" at Sula's funeral (173) . The intrusion of those memories in this return of the repressed violate the linear chronological movement of the text, demonstrating that the novel still seeks to repeat the trauma, to repress it.
Still, the eruption of Nel's memories of Sula's funeral and the pain she experiences, recalled in a detour from the straight linearity of the plot, is a return of the repressed with a difference: Nel seems to be moving closer to a recognition of the degree to which internal violence has 108
disrupted the harmony of the community and to the truth of
her relationship with Sula. Just as Sula sought to disturb
Nel's righteousness, Eva confuses Sula and Nel, claiming that
they are one and the same. What has been perceived as the
greatest difference of all, that between Sula and Nel, is
erased with Eva's claim:
"Just alike. Both of you. Never was no difference between you." "Tell me how you killed that little boy." "What? What little boy?" "The one you threw in the water. I got oranges. How did you get him to go into the water?" I didn't throw no little boy in the river. That was Sula." "You. Sula. What's the difference? You was there. You watched, didn't you? Me, I never would've watched." You're confused. Miss Peace. I'm Nel. Sula's dead." (168)
Despite Eva's insistence that Nel and Sula are one and the same, equally guilty in Chicken Little's death, Nel only
slowly begins to acknowledge her culpability. When she does, her recognition takes the form of a flood of repressed memories from her unconscious. An italicized passage signals that Nel experiences more than a repetition, but a repetition with a difference, a reenactment of the moments immediately
following Chicken Little's death:
Outside she fastened her coat against the rising wind. The top button was missing so she covered her throat with her hand. A bright space opened in her head and memory seeped into it. Standing on a riverbank in a purple-and-white dress, Sula swinging Chicken Little around and around. His laughter before the hand-slip and the water closing quickly over the place. What had she felt then, watching Sula going around and around and then the little boy swinging out over the water? Sula had cried and cried when she came back from Shadrack's house. But Nel had remained calm. 109
"Shouldn't we tell?" "Did he see?" "I don't know." "Let's go. we can't bring him back. (169)
The passage bursts into the text— irrepressible— just as it
bursts into Nel's consciousness. Nel remembers "the good
feeling she had had when Chicken's hands slipped," a feeling
she realizes "she hadn't wondered about . . . in years"
(170). Finally compelled to examine her lack of remorse for
Chicken Little's death, Nel asks herself, "Why didn't I feel
bad when it happened? How come it felt so good to see him fall?" (170) . Nel's awareness grows as she remembers that
she had enjoyed watching Chicken Little drown, just as Sula had been fascinated watching Hannah burn:
All these years she had been secretly proud of her calm, controlled behavior when Sula was uncontrollable, her compassion for Sula's frightened and shamed eyes. Now it seemed that what she had thought was maturity, serenity and compassion was only the tranquility that follows a joyful stimulation. Just as the water closed over the turbulence of Chicken Little's body, so had contentment washed over her enjoyment. (170)
Nel's repressed memories confirm her lack of difference
from Sula. Yet, one important difference remains. Her
recognitions necessarily return her to a time before and to
a reliving of a crucial moment in the evolution of her
relationship with Sula. The return of the repressed, the psychological unraveling of the "gray ball," moves Nel closer
toward recognition of her role as Sula's persecutor. Once
Nel realizes that she has persecuted and scapegoated Sula,
she experiences a rebirth not unlike that of Sula on her deathbed.G Until this point, Nel has protected herself 110
against "self-knowledge by a factitious, socialized
'innocence' which allows her to categorize Sula as 'bad' even
as she enjoys using Sula as a scapegoat and 'other.' That
she herself may be as 'evil' as Sula, and in fact more so
because of her hypocrisy, strikes Nel at the conclusion"
(Grant 101). Rather than experiencing her repressed memories
as "present," Nel is now able to experience them in the present as "gone things" (174) . Similarly, Shadrack moves beyond the past, gets on with the business of living his
life: "He stopped. Trying to remember where he had seen [Nel] before. The effort of recollection was too much for him and he moved on. He had to haul some trash out at Sunnydale and
it would be good and dark before he got home" (173) . Nel's memories and her repressed love for Sula, literally erupt, forcing themselves up into her throat :
Shadrack and Nel moved in opposite directions, each thinking separate thoughts about the past . The distance between them increased as they both remembered gone things. Suddenly Nel stopped. Her eye twitched and burned a little. "Sula?" Nel whispered, gazing at the tops of trees. "Sula?" Leaves stirred; mud shifted; there was the smell of over-ripe green things. A soft ball of fur broke and scattered like dandelion spores in the breeze. "All that time, all that time, I thought I was missing Jude." And the loss pressed down on her chest and up into her throat. "We was girls together," she said as though explaining something. "0 Lord, Sula," she cried, "girl, girl, girlgirlgirl." It was a fine cry— loud and long— but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow. (174)
Quoting Walter Benjamin, who writes that "Death is the sanction of everything the storyteller can tell," Peter Ill
Brooks points out that "this need not be a literal death— it can be a simulacrum, some end to a period, and arrest— very often it is" (95). For Sula, the emergence into the narrative and into Nel's consciousness of recognitions complicating her own sense of guilt in her relationship with
Sula, acknowledging her responsibility for shutting Sula out, and her complicity in Chicken Little's death, is an awareness that changes Nel's life, though it does nothing to alter the destiny of the community, which has already collapsed. Karen Stein asserts that for Nel, Sula's influence is long-lived, permanent, arguing essentially that Nel's "self-awareness is increased through contact with Sula and through Sula's death"
(149). Her awareness confers on Sula's life a certain viability and justification, while it smears Nel's spotlessness. More important, however, Nel's' recognition, signaled by her awareness of her oppression of Sula, or at least her part in that oppression, is not a repetition in the way that Shadrack's story repeats the original "nigger joke" that instigated plot; instead, it is, to use Brooks' terms, a remembering of the events "as something belonging to the past" (98) .
In Reading for the Plot, Brooks describes the pain associated with the reliving of traumatic events and suggests that that pain is liberating, necessary for escape from the web of repetitions:
The return to origins has led to the the return of the repressed, and vice versa. Repetition as return becomes a reproduction and reenactment of infantile experience: not simply a recall of the primal moment, but a reliving of its pain and terror, suggesting the impossibility of escape from the originating scenarios of childhood, and condemnation forever to replay them. (126) 112
Without the confrontation with Eva and the recognition that
follows, Nel would be condemned to replay her anger and
disapproval of Sula. She would never achieve the self-
awareness that enables her to find closure to her
relationship with Sula. Nel achieves the incorporation of
"past within the present, mastered through the play of
repetition [necessary] in order for there to be an escape
from repetition: in order for there to be difference, change, progress" (Brooks 134). Thus, the novel is able to escape its plottedness through narrative sacrifice, through
incorporating the past as past in the present. Nel's recognition turns us back into the text, reinfusing the metonymic substitutions with a new meaning; we are able then to reinstill meaning to the collapsed metaphor.
We understand the other incidents of violence in the text in the context of and in relation to Nel's treatment of Sula.
The dynamics of their relationship provide the key to unlocking the meaning of the metonymic repetitions of oppression and subjugation which constitute the text. Nel's fine, loud cry describes Sula, an outburst of pain that reaches no conclusion. But it is not fair to say that Sula has no bottom, apart from the fact that the Bottom is no longer, for the cause of that pain that drives the novel is the violence within and without the community. Engendered in white oppression, violence destroys Sula, her relationship with Nel, and the community itself. Sula is, in part, the story of a social suicide, but it is also the story of how oppression can set up so much internal strife within the 113 black community that social and individual self-destruction become inevitable.
Karen Stein writes of Nel's epiphany that
when she weeps for Sula, she is freed from old constraints and misconceptions, stripped of her false moral pride and smugness. Through this mourning for her dead friend/self at Sula's graveside, Nel is symbolically reborn as the surviving self, continuing the process of growth and self-awareness that Sula began. (149)
Nel's epiphany is reminiscent of Claudia's awareness at the close of The Bluest Eye, an awareness that affords redemption for Nel alone, offering nothing to the community. The problem of limited redemption is one that prevents real closure for this novel. Nel's recognition, her incorporation of the past into the present, prevents her from repeating the past, but it has not redeemed or saved the community.^ Nor does it fill in the persistent gaps in Sula. Nel's recognition never fully acknowledges the extent to which oppressor/oppressed dynamics are operating within the community. Those substitutions, those incidents involving violent interactions among community members, are never fully attributed to that originary trauma. Those wounds remain unhealed. And, like Nel's cry, the novel will never be finished— it will continue in "circles and circles of sorrow." 114
NOTES
Robert Grant writes that Keith Byerman defends the complexity of authorial vision underlying the holistic depiction of the relatively insulated black community of the Bottom when he argues that white ' [c]ompulsion can cause suffering and sorrow, as it does in the exploitation that creates and maintains the Bottom, but it cannot be totalitarian'" (90; Byerman's brackets). As I argue here, as a cause for frustration that must find release, oppression is the trauma that instigates the novel in the first place. And, moreover, that oppression and the dominant position of the whites limit the choices the black community has for responding to the oppressors.
^ In "The Tripled Plot and Center of Sula," Maureen Reddy reads Sula as an anti-war novel, though her definition of war is expanded to include "legal, economic, and social v/ar against black people by the society in which they live . . . and hostility toward black women" (30-31). This "war" against black people by the white society assumes a number of forms as Reddy points out, forms that Morrison chronicles in a list. Residents of the Bottom are determined not to let anything— anything at all: not failed crops, not rednecks, lost jobs, sick children, rotten potatoes, broken pipes, bug-ridden flour, third class coal, educated social workers, thieving insurance men, garlic ridden junkies, corrupt Catholics, racist Protestants, cowardly Jews, slaveholding Moslems, jackleg nigger preachers, squeamish Chinamen, cholera, dropsy or the Black Plague, let alone a strange woman— keep them from their God. (Sula 40)
The "Black Plague," of course, is the war on blacks that white society wages; the disasters listed above are its weapons. Reddy suggests that the list outlines the extent of the selflessness required by the black community's god. She asserts that the list suggests the "enormity of the sufferings that black people [as a whole] endured" (40).
^ Sula's connections with plagues and sickness mark her as an archetypal victim, set her apart and establish her difference— the plague might be more fitting as a symbol of the disharmony in the community that Sula returns to. The plague of robins might also symbolize a disruption in a natural force, or as a bird that traditionally welcomes the return of warmer weather and spring, the robins might indicate a natural force working overtime, gone haywire. Within the dynamics of oppressor/oppressed, Sula is, of 115
course, both poison and cure— as the symbol of the community's struggle to define itself, she is emblematic of both the cause and the result of crisis within the community.
^ Linda Wagner writes that For Cynthia Davis Sula is a scapegoat story, and Sula— like Pecola Breedlove— allows her community to feel superior and thereby improve their own image and behavior. Whereas Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi sees Sula as a force for good in the society, Davis sees Sula as a less positive force. Sula's 'curiosity' about her mother's burning, her inability to feel any sorrow for the child's drowning, her readiness to succumb to the same possessiveness she has ridiculed in Nel— reviewing these facts, Davis concludes that Sula "is not fully heroic . . . Freedom defined as total transcendence lacks the intention and significance that can come from commitment." And Barbara Hill Rigney sees Sula as 'a composite of archetypal scapegoats . . . ." Yet Sula never chooses her martyrdom, and Morrison's attention is, finally, less on Sula than it is on the community. Sula's rebellion is against Medallion's conventions, but it has no real 'center,' no purpose. According to Davis, Sula is 'Morrison's version of the Jungian shadow' but without a conscience. If Medallion can be translated as mandala, Shadrack seen as a Holy fool, and Sula as a scapegoat, then the novel is not "a celebration of the heroism of black women, but an indictment of society's immoral and irresponsible need to create scapegoat's in the first place." (200)
Davis employs Sartre's theories of the Other and the gaze of the Other to explore Sula from an ontological point of view. In doing so, she describes the interaction between Nel and Sula: "Sartre says that one way to handle the gaze of the Other is to 'ally myself to the Third so as to look at the Other who is then transformed into our object.' The internalization of white values is one such act. The choice of a scapegoat goes further, displacing onto the Other all that is feared in the self, and so remaining 'free'" ("Self, Society, and Myth" 328).
^ Robert Grant describes Sula as a novel that, among other things, "deals" with "the deep-structured sociological/anthropological connection between 'pariahs' and collective morality" (102). He argues that Sula is a "willing pariah" and an "outcast," but not a "stereotyped Victim." Moreover, he adds that through Sula the community is "exposed" (91). Grant is right to point out that the community in the Bottom is also, in James Coleman's words, "petty, hateful, and spiteful" (92). According to Grant, the community in the Bottom "releases some of its uneasiness by 116 classifying . . . Sula as 'evil,'" and by labeling her as "distinctly different" (92). Davis writes, "Sula's neighbors fear and condemn her refusal to fit a conventional role, but her shapelessness gives them shape .... Displacing their fear and anger onto Sula, as onto Pecola, they can define themselves as 'better'" (331) . Maureen Reddy concurs by describing "Sula [as] the speck around which the townspeople grow, at least temporarily, in reaction to her having violated their most basic rules, chief among them the dicta against sexual relationships with white men and the dicta against disrespecting the elderly" (39).
^ In her study of Morrison's narrative progression, "The Self and Other: Reading Toni Morrison's Sula and the Black Female Text," Deborah E. McDowell describes how Sula 's narrative retreats from [the] linearity . . . privileged in the realist mode. Though dates entitle the novel's chapters, they relate only indirectly to its central concerns and do not permit the reader to use chronology in order to interpret its events in any cause/effect fashion. In other words, the story's forward movement in time is deliberately nonsequential and without explicit reference to 'real' time. (86)
Indeed, interpretation of the novel hinges on understanding relationships of sameness and difference among isolated incidents within the plot, within the fabula. Chronology is consistently defeated by the recursive narrative movement. Robert Grant refers to the critics' awareness of Sula as circular and "spiral," and labels its spatial structure as "quasipalindromic," noting that the two sections of the novel are of identical length and introduce characters in the second section in the reverse order that they were introduced in the first section. He adds that the novel begins "in memory" and concludes with "Nel's crucial remembrance of Sula" (95). Grant also notes that the novel seems to be one that withholds or maintains, in Frank Kermode's words, narrative "secrets" (95). He notices that the novel's center is a "fixed lacuna," a gap that demands filling in by the reader (95).
^ Morrison confirms that Nel's rebirth is possible only as a result of the working through the chain of repetitions that is the plot of the novel; "there are always possibilities— choices," Morrison has said, "just knowing what those choices are or being able to make a commitment about those choices or knowing something that you would never have known had you not had that experience— meaning the book. . . . whatever Nel knows finally about her relationship with Sula, could not have been clear without the experience of the book" (qtd. Bessie Jones, "An Interview with Toni Morrison" 136). 117
Deborah McDowell explores how character in Sula must be viewed as "process" versus character as static "essence" based on the assumption that "the self is multiple, fluid, relational, and in a perpetual state of becoming" (81). Furthermore, she argues convincingly that "Sula never achieves completeness of being. She dies in the fetal position welcoming this 'sleep of water,' in a passage that clearly suggests, she is dying yet aborning" (81).
^ Karen Stein's study of Sula is sensitive to the role of both violence and ritual in the novel. Moreover, she understands that the novel ultimately seek redemption, a redemption that is not really the province of the people of the Bottom to achieve. Stein argues that Unlike many traditional epics, Sula begins with the razing of the Bottom to make room for a whites-only golf course. This destruction which sets the book's tone of hovering doom is both example and symbol of the steady erosion that the black community and its members suffer. The contrast of fertile life and sterile machinery reenacts the black struggle to survive in the face of white oppression, the epic struggle between life and death. Economically and politically powerless, the black community is vulnerable to white society's exploitative self-aggrandizement. By the book's ambiguous conclusion only one character— Nel— will enact the epic promise of renewal. (146)
Finally, Stein points out that "the novel ironically emphasizes the distance between the ideal of epic regeneration and the impossibility of redemption in the fallen world of modern America" (148) . CHAPTER III
Chronicles of Desire: Movement and Flight in Song of Solomon
Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon is an engine driven by desire. Less lyrical, perhaps, than her earlier novels. Song of Solomon is fueled by the desire to understand the past and to return to origins. It thrives on secrets from the past, devouring them as it expands. In Song of Solomon Morrison continues to interrogate the community's entrapment in seemingly inescapable cycles of violence. But, more important in Song of Solomon is the concern with a movement forward to origins. That movement gives Song of Solomon its structure and its motivating force. More heavily plotted than The Bluest Eye or Sula, this novel is constructed around the gradual revelation of a series of secrets, exposure of painful and violent past histories that must emerge from the unconscious and be reexperienced before the novel can find a cure from plot or the community can escape cycles of reciprocal violence. Without the working through of repressed material, material that is consistently violent and traumatic. Song of Solomon could not exist. Instead, the novel delves fully into the secrets buried in the past, achieving as it does so, Morrison's most closed, most complete text.
118 119
As in Morrison's other works, violence in Song of
Solomon stems from the pressure that the dominant, ruling society places on the black community to abandon their traditional values and to adopt white values of materialism.^
In fact, the clash of value systems as they are embodied in Macon Dead, a black landlord and father of the protagonist, and Pilate Dead, Macon's eccentric sister and co-protagonist, provides a central focus for this novel.^ In Song of
Solomon, as in Morrison's other novels, the roots of violence within the black community are located in white violence perpetrated against blacks and in the pervasiveness of white oppression. Macon Dead's value system, based on greed and oppression, perpetuates violence that ultimately tears at the social fabric of the community. On the other hand, Pilate's system of "folk" values struggles to preserve the community through tolerance, compassion, and a sense of social responsibility and connectedness— traditional African-
American values lacking in Macon's cult of desire. And, as we have seen, rampant violence and cycles of reciprocal violence are diseases that search for their cure in the sacrifice of a scapegoat. Through her central characters, in
Song of Solomon Morrison explores the community's propensity to seek out scapegoats and demonstrates that, although the individual can escape from violence, the cure for violence in the community is elusive, if not impossible to find. Thus,
Song of Solomon continues her exploration of these themes which she begins in The Bluest Eye and Sula. 120
Like Sula, this novel focuses, for the most part, on
Macon Dead's son's. Milkman's, quest for self-definition and acceptance of social responsibility. On the broadest narrative level, the novel's two parts echo or mirror each other. The first section of the novel is driven by the novel's and the characters' desire to return to origins, to work through painful repressed memories from the past in an effort to allow the plot to move forward. The second half of the novel treats Milkman's struggle to understand his personal past, a past intrinsically tied to and a repetition of the ancestral past of his parents and grandparents. The second half of the novel is also concerned with returning to origins; however, the return manifests itself in a physical return: Milkman's journey to the South. Throughout the novel
Milkman's forward-moving plot is interrupted by returns of the repressed, memories of violence erupting into the text and detouring Milkman's plot. These repetitions of an earlier trauma are the equivalent of and frequently depict reciprocal acts of violence within the community. Thus, in comparison to The Bluest Eye and Sula, Song of Solomon constitutes Morrison's most complex and elaborate use of a recursive narrative strategy, though, as I will show.
Beloved's narrative pushes this recursive narrative pattern to its limits. Violence in Morrison's third novel also stems from white oppression and from the abandonment by elements within the black community of a set of cultural values intended to preserve a black folk heritage characterized by love and tolerance, a value system intended to preserve the unity and 121 strength of the community. A desire for freedom and a belief that freedom can be purchased only through wealth and materialism threaten to erode the sense of unity and shared identity vital to the health of the community. This desire translates into the oppression of one segment of the black community by another, more economically powerful segment of the black community. Thus, subjugation of one segment of the population by another "repeats" white subjugation of blacks and is an unhealthy and nonproductive response to oppression. Several characters in the novel are representative of the value systems at odds within the community; their struggles are representative of the contention within the community at large. For example, as the figure who best represents the abandonment of cultural values within the black community in favor of wealth and possessions, Macon perverts his father's value system, converting his father's values into a desire for self-gain that disregards others.
Macon is the son of a man who built a life and a home out of nothing, whose accomplishments spoke to his people of achievement in the face of the worst possible odds:
"You see?' the farm said to them. 'See? See what you can do ? Never mind you can't tell one letter from another, never mind you born a slave, never mind you lose your name, never mind your daddy dead, never mind nothing. . . . Nobody starving in my home; nobody crying in my home, and if I got a home you got one too." (237)
Having created this heaven on earth out of his own sweat and determination, Macon's father shared the benefits with his neighbors, thus preserving harmony in the community, as well as contributing to the community's sense of self-worth and 122 identity. However, Macon's oppressive treatment of his family and his tenants can be traced to his wholesale purchase of the desire for wealth. In contrast to his father's view, Macon's credo is to "own things. And let the things you own own other things. Then you'll own yourself and other people too" (55). Macon has accumulated enough wealth that Milkman can impress his old friends in Virginia with tales of his possessions— "Milkman found himself rattling off assets like an accountant, describing deals, total rent income, bank loans, and this nev.- thing his father was looking into— the stock market" (238) . Yet Macon is closely associated with white persecutors who are intolerant, negligent, and greedy. His deal to buy the Erie Lackawanna testifies to his insatiable greed (72). His callous intolerance toward Guitar— Milkman's best friend and one of
Macon's tenants— and his mother demonstrates that there was little difference between Macon and white landlords (21).
Macon's oppressive treatment of his black brothers and sisters extends to his family, which lives in constant fear of him. Macon's family represents for him not connectedness or love, but wealth, status,and power: "These rides that the family took on Sunday afternoons had become rituals and much too important for Macon to enjoy. For him it was a way to satisfy himself that he had become a successful man" (29) . The Dead family seems a microcosm of white/black relations in which the power of the oppressor saps the will and identity of the oppressed:
Solid, rumbling, likely to erupt without prior notice, Macon kept each member of his family awkward with fear. His hatred of his wife 123
glittered and sparked in every word he spoke to her. The disappointment he felt in his daughters sifted down like ash, dulling their buttery complexions and choking the lilt out of what should have been girlish voices. Under the frozen heat of his glance they tripped over doorsills and dropped the salt cellar into the yolks of their poached eggs. The way he mangled their grace, wit, and self-esteem was the single excitement of their days. {Song of Solomon 10)
Ruth Dead is perhaps Macon's most devastated victim.
Macon has pressed every fiber of happiness out of his wife's life, so that she is left with only a water ring on the
elegant dining room table as a reminder of "the summation of the affectionate elegance with which she believed her childhood had been surrounded" (12). Ruth is so isolated and alone that she turns to nursing her son. Milkman, well beyond the age at which he can wear pants, in an effort to find meaning and purpose, to feel connected. When nursing
Milkman, she felt "as though she were a cauldron spinning gold. Like the miller's daughter— the one who sat at night in the straw filled room, thrilled by the secret power
Rumplestiltskin had given her: thrilled to see the golden thread stream from her very own shuttle" (13). Her isolation drives her to her father's grave, where she seeks the connectedness and acceptance that her husband denies her.^
Similarly, Macon effectively denies his daughters--
Magdalene called Lena and Corinthians— a real life, preserved as they are according to their father's wishes as symbols of his accomplishment. Macon's desire to succeed within a materialistic culture and value system thwarts his children's attempts to achieve identities of their own. At forty-two. 124
Corinthians accepts a job as a maid; though she has been
educated at Bryn Mawr, her hopes of "marrying well" have been
dashed after so many years (191-92). Magdalene called Lena,
choosing to forego college out of fear of "what he [Macon] might do to Mama" had she left, has even less in her forties
than her sister, who has at least found a man, though a Southside one of whom neither Milkman nor Macon approve
(217). In Lena's estimation, Macon has treated them as
objects their entire lives: "First he displayed us, then he
splayed us. All our lives were like that: he would parade us
like virgins through Babylon, then humiliate us like whores
in Babylon" (217-18). Corinthians and Lena remain, instead,
Macon's daughters, struggling constantly to escape from his oppressive gaze. Finally, Macon's violence extends to his
sister, Pilate, who is consistently portrayed as a victim of other blacks. Macon is willing to put Pilate in jail: "He thought for the hundredth time that she needed to be put in
jail and that he would be willing to put her there if he
could be sure that she wouldn't loudmouth him and make him
seem trashy in the eyes of the law— and the banks" (24) .
Morrison also portrays the perfect model of reciprocal violence in the Days, a violent nationalist group of blacks who seek revenge for the suffering of blacks at the hands of ruthless white killers who victimize blacks with impunity.
Guitar, Milkman's best friend and a member of the Days, describes how the Days choose innocent victims for their revenge at random, in every case, an innocent victim:
But when a Negro Child, Negro woman, or Negro man is killed by whites and nothing is done by their law and their courts, this society selects a victim 125
at random, and they execute him or her in a similar manner if they can. If the Negro was hanged, they hang; if a Negro was burned, they burn; raped and murdered, they rape and murder. If they can. If they can't do it in precisely the same manner, they can do it any way they can, but they do it. They call themselves the Seven Days. (155)
Certainly, the Days have grounds for their desire to strike out at the whites who wrong them. The stories of the men in the barbershop testify to the legitimacy of their claims:
"the men began to trade tales of atrocities . . . they laughed then, uproariously, about the speed with which they had run, the pose they had assumed, the ruse they had invented to escape or decrease some threat to their manliness, their humanness" (83). The purpose of the Days, according to Guitar, is "to keep the ratio [of whites to blacks] the same" (156) . He argues, however, that the activities of the Days are motivated by love of blacks, and not by hatred of the whites: "No love? No love? Didn't you hear me? What I'm doing is not about hating white people.
It's about loving us. About loving you. My whole life is love" (160) .
Their love, however, is counter to Pilate's compassion and interest in the lives of individuals; the Days operate on the principle of revenge, seeking to replace one victim with another. They strike out at the oppressors, but their secrecy denies the black community satisfaction or justice.
Furthermore, regardless of whether or not their revenge is secret, the Seven Days only perpetuate the chain of reciprocal violence, and do little to address the problems of oppression that plague the black community. Ultimately, the 126 desire that motivates the Days is a desire to emulate the white community, to wield their power, and to dominate as they dominate. Guitar's willingness in the second section of the novel to murder Milkman is a testament as well to the way that white oppression trickles down into violence within the black community and how the desire for material wealth and power invariably leads to violent confrontation.
Song of Solomon opens with the suicide of a member of the Days. Robert Smith's suicide acts as a metonymic substitution for Milkman's great-grandfather's flight out of slavery and demonstrates that the attempt to adopt a white value system and to return violence for violence is ultimately self-destructive. Smith writes in his suicide note that "at 3:00 P.M. on Wednesday the 18th of February,
1931, I will take off from Mercy and fly away on my wings. Please forgive me. I loved you all" (3) . Smith's flight, motivated by love of life, is the result of his inability to perform his duties as a member of the Seven Days. He can no longer kill and thus must commit suicide. The note that he attaches to his door inscribes the whole of the text to follow. It is the consummate case of the end in the beginning. The velvet roses strewn on the ground where Smith will eventually fall to his death are symbolic of the blood spilt in the chain of reciprocal violence. On this occasion,
Pilate will also inscribe the secret of the text, the song of
Solomon, singing "Sugarman done fly away" (5) .
Moreover, Smith's suicide is representative of the self destructive violence rampant in the community. As a member of the Days he is deeply enmeshed in the chain of reciprocal 127 violence that they perpetuate. Violence ultimately destroys him. Still, Smith dies for the love of his people. Less than connected with them, he shows up on his neighbor's doorsteps "twice a month to collect one dollar and sixty- eight cents" (8). An insurance man who is "heavily associated with illness and death," Smith's example shows how reciprocal violence translates into the social suicide of the community. The Days' activities provide no insurance that whites will cease victimizing blacks.
Thus, violence manifests itself overtly in white attacks on defenseless, innocent black victims and in the Days' attempts at revenge. It finds expression as well in repetitions of white oppression by members of the black community who subjugate their own people, at times those closest to them, as in the case of Macon Dead and his family and tenants. Again, the violence within the black community can be traced to the white society's violent treatment of the blacks. However, though violence is central to the thematics of this and all of Morrison's novels, the discovery of meaning takes place on a narrative level in a way that can be described as violent. Song of Solomon's psychoanalytic narrative involves the characters and the text in a consistent drive to return to the past in an effort to work through painful, repressed memories. More often than not, the repressed memories that emerge in the narrative are accounts of violence and trauma, repetitions of an original act of violence, one that instigates the entire narrative.
The novel, then, becomes a slow unfolding of secrets. 128
The story of Macon's father, the first Macon Dead or
Jake, and the violence he suffers only slowly emerges from
the text, gradually revealed in a series of detours that
return us to the past, to the origins of the Dead family, and
to the roots of a legacy of violence. It is as if the
memories of their father's fate are too painful for Macon and
his sister, Pilate, to treat in one retelling. They must be
worked through gradually. All of the memories of their
father, however, recount his struggle to free himself from
white oppression, to forge for himself a name and an
identity, and finally, to preserve his manhood and dignity as
a human being. Information regarding Macon's father, Jake,
and his fate is initially divulged in bits and pieces. First mention occurs in the first few pages of the novel when Macon
refers to the "monumental foolishness" with which the "giving of names in his family" was surrounded (15). He reflects that his father had "agreed to take and pass on to all their
issue this heavy name scrawled in perfect thoughtlessness by a drunken Yankee in the Union Army" (18). In Song of
Solomon, the white community consistently refuses to allow blacks an identity or a place in the world. For example,
Jake finds that his identity is denied him through a simple act of "carelessness" on the part of a drunken white soldier.
However, recalling that event requires considerable effort on the part of the narrative. Readers are provided with only tantalizing bits of information and are denied the entire story.
The remainder of the story of the naming of Macon's father and his death at the hands of greedy whites is 129
reserved until Macon, his memory jolted by a confrontation
with Milkman, recalls the events in an elaborate detour from
Milkman's plot. Little transition is provided into the long
tale that Macon tells his son: "... Macon roared. He took
his hands out of his pockets but didn't know what to do with
them. He was momentarily confused. His son's question has
shifted the scenery. He was seeing himself at twelve,
standing in Milkman's shoes and feeling what he himself had
felt for his own father" (50). "Maybe," Macon thinks to himself, "it was time to tell things" (51). Macon's story to
Milkman recounts how his father had scratched out a beautiful
farm from nothing. Yet it also recalls how his father had
been "tricked" by the whites, how they had forced him to
"sign something" and thus robbed him of his land (53). The
central focus of the story is, thus, how his father was
denied his identity through careless naming. Macon is amazed
at how "for years you can't remember nothing. Then just like
that, it all comes back to you" (52). Memories of his own
origins, his beginnings, the source of his desire come
flooding uncontrollably into Macon's consciousness. His memories are colored by Macon's view of the white man's attitude toward blacks: "Kill a nigger and comb they hair at
the same time. But I've seen grown white men cry about their
dogs" (52). Jake's story remains untold until, in a similar detour,
Pilate, Macon's eccentric sister, deliberately tells the
story to Milkman. Pilate's rememories are not characteristic of the text, for they are deliberate and calculated, less a
return of the repressed than a conscious recalling and 130
reexperiencing of violence and trauma. Still, Pilate's memories are incomplete, and she detours from one traumatic
experience to another, not accounting fully for the experience which is locked in narrative repression. For example, when Pilate reminisces about the farm, her father's death and what happened to her and Macon following his death, her memories are interrupted; her story detours itself, not able to work itself completely free of the unconscious of the text. Pilate is able, however, to recount how her father was
shot off the fence:
Our papa was dead, you see. They blew him five feet up into the air. He was sitting on the fence waiting for 'em, and they snuck up from behind and blew him five feet into the air. . . . But Papa came back one day. We didn't know it was him at first, cause we both saw him blowed five feet into the air." (40)
Pilate's stories work through painful, previously repressed memories of traumatic events; they waylay the forward movement of Milkman's plot, although working through the memories is essential to his search for identity because they form an integral part of his identity. The detours within detours are characteristic of Morrison's jerky, start-and- stop narrative pattern. The difference here is the obvious preoccupation with a return to origins and the essential role that understanding the past plays in understanding and defining the self.
Song of Solomon's plot is comprised of repetitions of the father's murder, his failure to reach higher than five feet into the air. Moreover, this originary act of violence, to which Macon will respond with violence, is perpetrated 131 against blacks by the white society. Macon's act of revenge
is repressed at this point in the text, only to emerge later.
Revelation is gradual, a slow unwinding. The release of
repressed material has a twofold effect, at once piquing the
reader's desire to push forward to the end, and returning the reader to a beginning, the first moments of the narratable.
Once the father has been shot off the fence, the narrative
(narratable) is born, though readers, for whom the narrative has begun in médias res, must experience the return to origins in order to extrapolate meaning from the text.
The narratable for one of Morrison's most memorable characters, Pilate Dead— Macon's eccentric sister— also begins with Jake's murder. Pilate's history of victimization and abandonment is also revealed in a series of detours, a history shared in fits and starts, in interruptions of
Milkman's forward-moving plot. Her memories make up one of the longest returns in the novel. Yet her story parallels
Milkman's quest to create or discover an identity.^ Pilate's stories are frequently keyed by contact with Milkman, to whom she attempts to transmit traditional values and beliefs. For example, when Pilate discusses questions of mortality with
Milkman, she retells the story of her own origins, describing how her own mother "died before [Pilate] was born" (114) and how "she had come struggling out of the womb without help from throbbing muscles or the pressure of the swift womb water" (27-28) .
Through the story of Pilate's birth, and a series of other deferrals of the forward-moving plot, Morrison reveals 132 that Pilate occupies an unusual position in the community as, on the one hand, its scapegoat, and, on the other hand, the preserver of the community's vital cultural values. As scapegoat, Pilate bears an unusual physical mark, or the lack of a physical mark— she has no navel. This physical oddity effectively marks her as an outcast from society. Viewed as grotesque monster, unnatural, something "God never made"
(144), Pilate is cut off from all meaningful social relationships :
It isolated her. Already without family, she was further isolated from her people, for, except for the relative bliss on the island, every other resource was denied her: partnership in marriage, confessional friendship, and communal religion. Men frowned, women whispered and shoved their children behind them. Even a traveling side show would have rejected her, since her freak quality lacked that important ingredient— the grotesque. There was nothing really to see. (149)
Pilate's association with the earth also helps to set her apart from other members of the community. All descriptions of Pilate show her deeply rooted in the earth, from her "berry-black lips" to the comparison between Pilate and "a tall black tree" (38). Moreover, Pilate sleeps on a mattress stuffed with pine needles. She "smelled . . . like a forest"
(27) and "swayed like a willow over her stirring" (28). In addition, Pilate is ostracized for her reputation as a conjure woman— "All those unbelievable but entirely possible stories about his father's sister— the woman his father had forbidden him to go near— had both of them spellbound" (35).
Long before Pilate becomes the scapegoat for this community, she suffers abuse and abandonment. Among other 133 things, Pilate is the victim of sexual abuse: "But the preacher started pattin on me. I was so dumb I didn't know enough to stop him. But his wife caught him at it, thumbin my breasts, and put me out" (142) . Pilate remains cut off and outcast for the better part of her life: "Pilate sucked a peach stone and her face was dark and still with the memory of how she was 'cut off' so early from other people" (142).
It was soon "discovered that the navel thing was what bothered them" (143) . Pilate becomes the victim of blacks who share Macon's appreciation for surface appearances and materialistic, white middle-class values. Even Milkman feels ashamed of Pilate, to hate her because he "felt personally responsible for her ugliness, her poverty, her dirt, and her wine" (37) . Finally, even though Pilate exists "barely within the boundaries of the elaborately socialized world of black people," she is an integral part of the community: she belongs as the supplier of the Dionysian wine (150).
Pilate's lifestyle is evidence that she has completely rejected the greed-driven capitalistic values, essentially the values of the white classes and of the burgeoning black middle class: "At night she and her daughter lit the house with candles and kerosene lamps; they warmed themselves and cooked with wood and coal, pumped kitchen water into a dry sink through a pipeline from a well and lived pretty much as though progress was a word that meant walking a little farther on down the road" (27). Pilate still embraces the traditional African-American values that place human concerns before materialistic concerns, a set of values that may 134
provide the community with escape from desire and,
consequently, violence and self-destruction.
Pilate is also deeply connected with her ancestors and
the past, not only through her lifestyle, but also through
her relationship with her dead father and his moral legacy.
Through her experiences in Montour County and her travels,
Pilate learns the value of human connectedness and selfless
love, developing along the way an "alien's compassion for
troubled people" (150) . Pilate "acquired a deep concern for and about human relationships. Those twelve years in Montour
County, where she had been treated gently by a father and a brother, and where she herself was in a position to help farm
animals under her care, had taught her a preferable kind of behavior. Preferable to that of the men who called her mermaid and the women who swept up her footprints or put mirrors on her door" (150). Moreover, Pilate "was a natural healer . . . but most important, she paid close attention to her mentor— the father who appeared before her sometimes and told her things" (150) . Pilate explains to Macon why she
returned to the cave where he had murdered a white man and
retrieved not the white man's gold, but his bones:
I went cause Papa told me to. He kept coming to see me, off and on. Tell me things to do. First he told me to sing, to keep on singing. "Sing," he'd whisper. "Sing, sing." Then right after Reba was born he came and told me outright: "you can't just fly on off and leave a body," he told me. A human life is precious. You shouldn't fly off and leave it. So I knew right away what he meant cause he was right there when we did it. He meant if you take a life then you own it. You are responsible for it. You can't rid of nobody by killing them. They still there, and they yours now. (209) 135
During her account of her travels and the birth of
Reba, Pilate reveals a portion of the secret of Macon's
crime. She also misinterprets her father's wishes that she
"Sing. Sing," although she only partially misinterprets the
rest of his edict that "you can't just fly off and leave a body" (148) . Perhaps she misinterprets, but Pilate still accepts responsibility for the evils in her past, is willing even to collect the bones of a dead white man, one who may have been among her father's murderers for all she knew. She interprets her father's message this way:
And she knew that he was telling her to go back to Pennsylvania and collect what was left of the man she and Macon had murdered. (The fact that she had struck no blow was irrelevant. She was part of her brother's act, because, then, she and he were one) . (148; Morrison's parentheses)
In direct contrast to Macon's materialism, Pilate believes in the value of human life. She finds security in community, not property. The doctrine of responsibility bequeathed to Pilate by her father states that "You can't take a life and walk off and leave it. Life is life. Precious. And the dead you kill is yours. They stay with you anyway, in your mind. So it's a better thing to have the bones right there with you wherever you go. That way, it frees up your mind" (210). Barbara Christian describes
Macon's values as centered around "the acquisition of property as a means of securing more and more wealth," values representative of "a rising Northern middle class, whose experience of racism in the South breeds in them an insatiable need for security" (72). "Pilate, his sister," on 136 the other hand, "represents the tradition that so identifies with Nature, it has no desire for material things" (Christian
72). Pilate's close association with nature aligns her with what Christian has defined as a "natural order" involving "funk and passion, and the desire for uncomplicated sweetness and light" (69). The tension between their value systems is the tension between capitalist and folk values, the folk values able to preserve the community and to staunch the flow of blood from internal conflict.
Milkman's struggle is, to a large extent, the struggle to reconcile these two sets of values. Pilate's accounts of her past metonymically repeat the violence visited on her father. Those acts of violence directed toward her represent the pressure on the individual attempting to discover and to define the self. Pilate's struggles for an individual identity repeat, on a symbolic level. Milkman's efforts to forge an identity.
The first half of Song of Solomon employs a narrative strategy dependent on the return of the repressed.
Ostensibly, the novel attempts to tell the story of Milkman's transformation, more specifically, the transformation of his desire for freedom into a desire for love and connectedness .
Character development follows a path from his self-centered desire for self-definition to his desire for a sense of social responsibility and a sensitivity to origins and identity. As we have seen. Milkman's plot is detoured repeatedly, moving forward by returning to the past to uncover and expose secrets of a violent history, Milkman's legacy of violence. However, the second half of the text 137
relies less on the narrative return to origins, and instead physically returns us to the past. Milkman departs on a
journey that sends him to Montour County, ultimately a return to the deepest roots of his family in this country, to the
source of his being, and to the wellspring of a lost or perverted value system. The physical return of the repressed is a drive to origins, a desire to return to a past that predates trauma and the introduction of violence into the community. Though the physical return of the repressed takes him to his ancestral homeland. Milkman's quest in the second half of the novel ironically becomes an attempt to reconcile his own personal past, his own behavior toward his family, Pilate, and Hagar, with his aunt Pilate's values of tolerance and identity through community. Memories of his own injustice and status as oppressor must be worked through just as his parent's history of violence must emerge in the first half of the novel. It is in understanding the links between his behavior and his family's history that Milkman can achieve escape from violence and repetition.
From the moment of his birth under special circumstances. Milkman is his father's son. He is the first black child to be born in the all-white "No Mercy Hospital."
The suicide of Robert Smith, insurance Agent, sends Ruth Dead into labor and Milkman is born the following day. Also,
Milkman is marked as hero by his mother's prolonged nursing and by his unusual fascination with flight, a legacy bequeathed to Milkman from Mr. Smith:
Mr. Smith's blue silk wings must have left their mark, because, when the little boy discovered at four, the same thing Mr. Smith had learned earlier— that only 138
birds and airplanes could fly— he lost all interest in himself. (9)
Milkman is born in violence, a child of violence.
Pilate recounts the lengths to which Macon went to have Ruth abort him:
"He come into the world trying to keep from getting killed. Layin in your stomach, his own papa tryin to do it. And you helped some too. He had to fight off castor oil and knittin needles and being blasted with hot steam and I don't know what all you and Macon did. But he made it." (140)
The opening pages detail subtly the conditions of oppression
into which Milkman is born, conditions characterized by the white community's refusal to allow the black community its
own particular form of identity. Morrison sets the opening
scene on "Not Doctor Street, a name the post office did not
recognize" (3). The street, associated in the minds of members of the black community with the only "colored doctor
in the city," receives the name for the officials' refusal to
allow them to call it "Doctor Street" (3-4) . Similarly the
"charity hospital" at the northern end of Not Doctor Street
comes to be called "No Mercy Hospital" for its discriminatory policy against blacks. The lower-class status of the blacks
in the community is evidenced by the white nurse's superior attitude toward Guitar Bains and his mother, over whom she assumes immediate authority.^
Milkman's crisis is a crisis of identity; his efforts to
distance himself from his father never achieve a definite
identity for him. He has inherited a legacy of violence and a belief in the power of money to purchase freedom, yet he 139
remains disconnected and shapeless. Though he despises and
wants to escape his father. Milkman follows in his footsteps,
believing, as his father has taught him to believe, in the
power of wealth and the self-sufficiency of the individual:
"Milkman feared his father, respected him, but knew, because
of the leg, that he could never emulate him. So he differed from him as much as he dared. Macon was clean-shaven;
Milkman was desperate for a mustache. Macon wore bow ties;
Milkman wore four-in-hands" (63). Still, Milkman adopts his
father's acquisitiveness and his desire to define himself
through his possessions.
In contrast. Guitar Bains, Milkman's closest friend, has a definite purpose in life as a result of his membership in the Seven Days. Milkman covets the strong sense of identity that Guitar's association with the Days gives him: Milkman asks himself, "Do you now know what it is like to risk your one and only self?" (177). As a way of defining his identity and of finding a prupose for his life. Milkman desires adventure, some complication in his adventure (175). He is hungry to know whether or not Guitar has murdered: "He was like a teenage girl wondering about the virginity of her friend, the friend who has a look, a manner newly minted— different, separate, focused somehow" (177). Milkman longs for focus, some purpose for his life, though he has rejected the purpose Guitar has chosen for himself. But is Guitar's desire for revenge selfless? In Milkman's eyes, it is the ultimate selfishness, primarily because of the secretiveness with which the Days carry out their work. Guitar and the
Days are rooted in revenge and violence in direct contrast to 140
Pilate and her folk values of love, acceptance, community,
and compassion, a contrast Milkman finally recognizes once
Pilate is shot by Guitar.
From the beginning. Milkman's quest is a search for
identity, a search that must choose between Guitar's and his
father's values and Pilate's values. At the start of his
quest. Milkman is a shapeless blob. He often glimpses,
however, his own lack of identity. Guitar complains that
Milkman has nothing to care about or about which he cares:
"I know you," Guitar tells him, "been knowing you. You got your high-toned friends and your picnics on Honoré Island and you can afford to spend fifty percent of your brainpower thinking about a piece of ass. You got that red-headed bitch and you got a Southside bitch and no telling what in between." (103)
Milkman takes Guitar's criticisms to heart, and thinks to himself: "Maybe Guitar was right— partly. His life was pointless, aimless, and it was true that he didn't concern himself an awful lot about other people" (106) .
The limited sense of self that Milkman does possess is tied to violence, and not surprisingly, the past that the first half of the novel reveals to him and readers both, is a history of violence and oppression. Motivated by outrage at his father's treatment of his mother. Milkman finally challenges him, knocking him to the floor: "Before his father could draw his hand back. Milkman yanked him back by the back of his coat collar, up out of his chair, and knocked him into the radiator" (67). Despite the "snorting, horse- galloping glee as old as desire" that Milkman feels at having successfully confronted his father. Milkman is intimidated by the changes that his victory over his father entail: "He had 141 won something and lost something in the same instant.
Infinite possibilities and enormous responsibilities stretched out before him, but he was not prepared to take advantage of the former, or accept the burden of the later"
(68). Milkman's feelings of selfhood are tied intrinsically to his identity as someone who has experienced a confrontation and showed up to tell about it. Following his
"victory" over his father. Milkman "felt a self inside himself emerge, a clean-lined definite self. A self that could join the chorus at Railroad Tommy's with more than laughter. He could tell this" (184-85) .
The incident marks a turning point of sorts for Milkman, the point at which he assumes dominance over the women in his family. Lena, the member of the Dead family who suffers as
Macon's daughter and Milkman's sister, believes Milkman's act is simply a usurpation of power on his part, designed not to protect the women, but to shift power over the women in the household to Milkman: "You think because you hit him once that we all believe you were protecting her. Taking her side. It's a lie. You were taking over, letting us know you had the right to tell her and all of us what to do" (217).
Moreover, Lena's claims are verified by Milkman's intervention in Corinthians' affair with Porter, an intervention that denies Corinthians a chance for a life— she complains that Macon "has forbidden her to leave the house, made her quit her job, evicted the man, garnished his wages, and it is all because of [Milkman]" (217) . According to
Lena, along with Corinthians', her "childhood was spent like a found nickel on you" (216) . In Lena's eyes, she and 142
Corinthians have devoted their entire lives to him, and
consequently been denied lives of their own. Milkman is, in
Lena's view, a "sad, pitiful, stupid, selfish, hateful man"
(218). His violence toward the women in his family extends even to Pilate, even though Milkman feels shame for his willingness to steal from Pilate, for his willingness to knock down the woman who "had brought him into the world when only a miracle could have" (211) .
Departures from the forward-moving plot of Milkman's quest inevitably involve the working through of painful memories of traumatic violent events in the characters' pasts. Moreover, the returns of the repressed invariably involve a return to origins as well, and the violent eruption into the text of the distant past, the beginning of Milkman's past. On a narrative level, the story of Pilate's daughter, Hagar, his relationship with her, and her final dissolution and death cannot be repressed and must be worked through before Milkman's plot can find a cure. Thus, her plot violently intrudes at a point where Milkman's plot has gained significant impetus, at point at which Milkman has worked through much of the pain of the past— it intrudes at a point where Milkman is "as eager and happy as he had ever been in his life" (308) .
Milkman's relationship with Hagar is recounted through a series of narrative returns of the repressed, a relationship defined by violence and demonstrating the destructiveness of desire and a failure of Pilate's philosophy of compassion.
Pilate lives an austere life characterized by denial of material goods and even the conveniences that most assume are 143
necessities such as running water and electricity. Her very
lifestyle is a demonstration of positive traditional values.
However, Pilate makes concessions to her lifestyle in Hagar's case, whose every whim and fancy is indulged: "We get you anything you want, baby. Anything. You been knowing that,"
Pilate tells her (48). When Hagar suggests that perhaps she has gone without in some way, her mother Reba "crumple[s]"
and Pilate's faces goes as still as a "mask" (48-49).
However, when Milkman falls out of love with Hagar,
loses interest in her, Hagar is ill-equipped for doing without. Her violent attempts to destroy Milkman— attempts to invoke fear in him if she cannot have his love (128)— demonstrate the pointlessness of the oppressed's attempts to return violence for the indifference, neglect, and devaluation of her oppressors. The unsanctioned, reciprocal violence she directs at Milkman only continues the chain of violence within the community. Though in a sense she is striking out at her oppressor. Milkman, his violence toward her grows out of the pressure from the dominant class to abandon his own people's values, though he must bear some responsibility for his actions. In addition, ultimately, her attempts are self-destructive. Pilate and Reba's treatment of Hagar, their willingness to indulge her desire for material goods, creates in her a destructive desire that must avenge itself. Of course, her desire cannot be fulfilled and the results are devastating for her.
Milkman's treatment of Hagar is representative of and a repetition of the oppressive and violent treatment blacks suffer under the thumb of their white oppressors, violent 144 treatment that translates into self-destructive violence within the black community itself. Hagar attempts to strike back at Milkman; however, physically she is powerless to mark him. His treatment of her aligns him with white oppressors who oppress through neglect, through a failure to recognize humanity and the worth of the individual. Finally, Morrison juxtaposes the rememories of Ruth's victimization at the hands of Macon with Milkman's rejection of Hagar, who turns into a beast set on destroying him. Her love for Milkman, her obsession with him, transforms her into an "indifferent natural phenomenon" (128) . Throughout the first half of Song of Solomon, returns of the repressed and a return to origins characterize Milkman's discovery of self. He attempts to but cannot escape his past or his parents' past: "he just wanted to beat a path away from his parents' past, which was also their present and which was threatening to become his present as well" (181).
His efforts to remain disconnected translate into a corresponding emptiness and spiritlessness. Milkman's attempts to repress and push back that past are typical of the analysand who resists reliving and reexperiencing painful traumata :
And his efforts to ignore it, transcend it, seemed to work only when he spent his days looking for whatever was light-hearted and without grave consequences. He avoided commitment and strong feelings, and shied away from decisions. He wanted to know as little as possible, to feel only enough to get through the day amiably and to be interesting enough to warrant the curiosity of other people—but not their all-consuming devotion. (181) 145
Ultimately, his lack of connectedness aligns him with Macon
who relates to his community only through his role as their
oppressor.
Once material from Milkman's ancestral past— memories of
violence in the Dead family— have worked their way into the
text, memories of Milkman's own origins begin to seek release; the secrets of his beginnings, i.e., the knowledge
that will help to shape his identity, begin to break into his consciousness. For example, following Macon's revelations about his mother's relationship with her father. Milkman
remembers, reluctantly, the incident that gave him his name, the discovery by Freddy of his mother suckling him when he
was old enough to wear pants:
Milkman stopped dead in his tracks. Cold sweat broke out on his neck. . . . He had remembered something. Or believed he remembered something. Maybe he'd dreamed it and it was the dream he was remembering. The picture was developing, of the two men in bed with his mother, each nibbling on a breast, but the picture cracked and in the crack another picture emerged. There was this green room, a very small green room, and his mother was sitting in the green room and her breasts were uncovered and somebody was sucking them and the somebody was himself. (78-79)
Remembering the incident with his mother "decomposes"
Milkman's feelings of love for his mother or, more specifically, the "confirmed, eternal love . . . that he didn't even have to earn" (79). Guitar's explanation of why
Milkman has hit his father, why his father hits his mother, and why Milkman's mother nursed him far past the age of wearing breeches is that "the cards are stacked against us and just trying to stay in the game, stay alive and in the 146 game, makes us do funny things. Things v/e can't help.
Things that make us hurt one another" (88). If Guitar is correct, then Milkman's nick-name is rooted in violence, his very identity an outgrowth of violence that took place long ago, when his grandfather was shot from a fence.
Memories of his oppressive, or at least unfair, treatment of his mother also emerge into Milkman's consciousness spontaneously and against his will. The text is unclear about whether or not Milkman's dream is a dream:
"Without the least transition and without knowing he was going to, he began to describe to Guitar a dream he had had about his mother. He called it a dream because he didn't want to tell him it had really happened, that he had really seen it" (105) . Morrison confuses readers about the reality of Milkman's "dream" in order to drive home for us the dream's impact on Milkman and the reluctance with which he allows repressed material to surface. In the dream Milkman refuses to offer help to his mother who is being strangled by a "mound of tangled tulips," emblematic of her suffering amid the trappings of material goods and apparent wealth. Guitar complains that it was his mother, so "why didn't [he] go help her?" (106). Guitar observes that to Milkman it must appear that "everybody's going in the wrong direction but you"
(106). Milkman, of course, is going backward, flying backward to his origins, slowly unraveling the history of mistreatment in his family and of his people.
Milkman also learns of his origins through tales transmitted by his mother; Ruth repeats tales to Milkman that have been divulged in other circumstances. Like most other 147 deferrals of the forward-moving plot in Song of Solomon, his mother's revelations move Milkman closer to an understanding and acceptance of her as an individual, and to a deeper understanding of himself. Ruth's trek to her father's graveside, where she "reignited that cared-for feeling that
[she] got from him" foreshadows Milkman's physical return to origins. After Milkman follows Ruth to her father's grave and confronted her, Ruth tells him the story of his birth and
Pilate's responsibility for seeing that he was born safely before he died at his father's hands:
"About two months later I was pregnant. When he found out about it . . . he told me to get rid of the baby. But I wouldn't and Pilate helped me stand him off. I wouldn't have been strong enough without her. She saved my life. And yours, Macon. She saved yours too." (125) .
Ruth's memories are stirred by this confrontation with Milkman, and the stories she tells are both a working through of painful material for her and a revelation for Milkman of the role that Pilate has played in his life, a revelation of the closeness with which he is connected to her.
Smoothly integrated into the text, Ruth's trip to
Pilate's home to find out about this woman who wanted to love her son but whose "anaconda love" might force her to kill him, occasions a return of repressed memories for Ruth of
Milkman's origins and the pain she suffered at Macon's hands in trying to bring Milkman into the world (131) . Her memories both advance Milkman's plot, return readers to his origins, and explain Ruth's eagerness to defend her son. However,
Ruth's act is not based on love as much as it is on violence 148 and revenge. To lose Milkman to Hagar's "anaconda love" is not to lose her son, whom she describes as "this tall man who had flesh on the outside and feelings on the inside that she knew nothing of," but to "deprive her of the one aggressive act brought to royal completion" (133). Defending Milkman from Hagar, who "shared Macon's blood," is an act of reciprocal violence directed toward Macon and motivated by vengeance and not by love. On a textual level, one act of violence, Hagar's violence toward Milkman, instigates another act of violence on Ruth's part, and jogs loose the memory of
Macon's violence toward her and her unborn son. Throughout, these returns of the repressed violently disrupt the forward movement of Milkman's plot, interrupting it and forestalling its conclusion.
Song of Solomon weaves its way through time present and time past, returning on the occasion of this most recent attack of Hagar's to the time a week earlier when Ruth had learned of Hagar's attempts on her only son's life. The narrative enters into Ruth's consciousness as she recalls how
when he discovered her pregnancy, he tried to get her to abort. Then the baby became the nausea caused by the half ounce of castor oil Macon made her drink, then a hot pot recently emptied of scalding water on which she sat, then a soapy enema, a knitting needle (she inserted only the tip, squatting in the bathroom, crying, afraid of the man who paced outside the door), and finally, when he punched her stomach (she had been about to pick up his breakfast plate, when he looked at her stomach and punched it), she ran to the Southside looking for Pilate. (131)
Even though the memories that emerge through Milkman's returns of the repressed may be repulsive to him, he must 149 work through them. In time, however, and once his physical return to origins begins. Milkman begins to accept his parents' past as his own. His growing acceptance marks steps in his progress toward self-definition. When Milkman follows his mother to her father's grave, he concludes that she is a
"silly, selfish, queer, faintly obscene woman" (123) . Her memories of the violence surrounding her father's death and the isolation she felt without him allow Milkman to develop a more mature and more tolerant appreciation of her as a woman, a separate individual with desires and needs: "Ruth was a pale but complicated woman given to deviousness and ultra- fine manners. She seemed to know a lot and understand very little. It was an interesting train of thought, and new for him. Never had he thought of his mother as a person, a separate individual, with a life apart from allowing or interfering with his own" (75). Milkman slowly begins to take steps in the direction of developing some kind of identity through his connectedness to the people around him, though the process requires him to break through his own self-centeredness.
Despite his advances toward a new sense of community.
Milkman's method for dealing with the "way-out tale[s]" about his family is to believe that his family "was a bunch of crazies" and "full of secrets" (76). Of Ruth's account of the violence surrounding her pregnancy and his birth. Milkman remarks to himself:
That was the beginning. Now it was all going to end. In a little while [Hagar] would walk in the door and this time he would let her do it. Afterward there would be no remembrance of who he was or where. Of Magdelena called Lena and First Corinthians, of his father trying 150
to stop him dead before he was born. Of the brilliant bitterness between his father and his mother, a bitterness as smooth and fixed as steel. And he wouldn't have those waking dreams or hear those awful words his mother had spoken to him: "What harm? What harm did I do you on my knees?" (126) .
Milkman seeks release from his pain in death; however, the fear of death effects a selflessness in Milkman, a first, tentative step toward the abandon and freedom that Pilate's brand of flight provides her.
Still focused solely on himself, it is not a sense of connectedness that frees Milkman, but fear. His relationship with Hagar is an attempt at flight, an attempt to fly off and leave Hagar behind. His assertiveness is driven by a selfish, self-interested desire to "live in this world on
[his] own terms," disconnected from his responsibilities to family or loved ones. He dismisses Hagar, who seeks to impinge on his precious independence, with a violence that is unequivocal :
"If you keep your hands just that way,' he said, 'and then bring them down straight, straight and fast, you can drive that knife right smack in your cunt. Why don't you do that? Then all your problems will be over.' He patted her cheek and turned away from her wide, dark, pleading, hollow eyes."(130).
Milkman is willing to abandon Hagar to her madness, just as his great-grandfather abandoned his wife and twenty-one children. It is not until Milkman understands this part of his past, that he is able to understand his own behavior, and move beyond it.
In other words, the text must allow characters to work through painful memories of their pasts before it can escape 151 from the cycle of repetition. Understandably it is more difficult for the more painful material to come to the surface. Milkman's plot is interrupted once again in this first section of the novel by a return of the repressed in which the secrets of Pilate's inheritance, which Macon has withheld from Milkman, emerge. Macon's tale of the gold and Morrison's decision to render it in the third person reveals a crucial difference in Macon and Pilate and helps to further delineate the rift between their values. The story of the gold is told not in Macon's voice, but in a third-person voice distinct from Macon's and which refers to Macon and
Pilate in the third-person: "Six days after Macon Dead died, his children, a twelve-year-old Pilate and a sixteen-year-old
Macon Dead, found themselves homeless" (166). The text is struggling to reveal its secrets, secrets common to the community, secrets demanding, because of their painful character, a distanced and objective voice. This third- person voice suggests that Macon cannot tell the story; he cannot confront his past, in contrast to Pilate's stories which are narrated in the first person and constitute a reexperiencing of past traumatic events and movement beyond those events, i.e., escape from the cycle of repetition and violence.
Nonetheless, even if Macon can't confront the past, the text must confront that trauma before it can move forward.
The narrative has repressed the whole truth, the incidents that are the most violent, the incidents tied to the death of the father and Macon's murder of the white man, the reciprocal act of vengeance. The story has been repressed 152
just as Macon wanted the "dead man to disappear, to be covered, hidden, to be gone" (170) . Macon clearly has the recent death of his father at the hands of white men in mind as he strikes out at the white man in the cave:
Macon saw that he was very old, very white and his smile was awful. . . . Macon stepped back, one hand outstretched behind him, thinking all the while of how his father's body had twitched and danced for whole minutes in the dirt. He touched the cave's wall and a piece of it gave way in his hand. Closing his fingers around it, he threw it at the grinning man's head, hitting him just above the eye. Blood spurted out and knocked the smile off the pale face, but did not stop the man from coming and coming, all the time wiping blood from his face and smearing it on his shirt. (170)
The incidents in the cave mark both the birth of Macon's desire and the onset of reciprocal violence within the community. Moreover, the story that Macon tells Milkman details how quickly the presence of a powerful desire can spread enmity within the black community, pitting brother against sister:
Macon slapped [Pilate] and the little brass box dangled on her ear. She cupped it in her hands for a moment and then leaped on her brother like an antelope. They fought right there in front of the dead man's staring eyes. Pilate was almost as strong as Macon, but no real match for him, and he probably would have beaten her unconscious had she not got his knife, not yet dry from the old man's blood, and held it ready for his heart. (172)
The scene depicts as well the wide divergence in
Pilate's and Macon's motives and values. Pilate "was growing roots where she stood, and staring open-mouthed at the dead man" (171) . While Pilate is sending her roots around the dead man, Macon is dreaming of the gold: "Life, safety. 153
luxury fanned out before him like the tail-spread of a
peacock, and as he stood there trying to distinguish each
delicious color, he saw the dusty boots of his father
standing just on the other side of the shallow pit" (171) .
Pilate turns her attention to the father, seeking
connectedness while Macon focuses on his new-born desire and
"piled the sacks of gold into the tarpaulin" (171). The tale
chronicles the birth of Pilate's compassion for others, her sense of responsibility.
The shift in point-of-view allows Morrison to return to
the present tense with no transition and without calling too much attention to the fact that the narrative is leaping between time past and time present. Milkman remarks; "The
secretaries went away. So did the children and the dogs.
Only the pigeons, the drunks, and the trees were left in the
little park" (173). Morrison's shifting point of view nonetheless turns our attention to the birth of desire in both Milkman and Guitar, though it might more accurately be
labeled the amplification and reinforcement of their desire—
Milkman's desire for wealth as a means of escape and Guitar's desire for wealth as a means for revenge. Both, however, are desires for violence, for Milkman's desire for flight is a
repetition of his great-grandfather's flight and of the originary murder of his grandfather. Guitar dreams of
Pilate's inheritance as a way to accomplish his mission as the "Sunday man": he dreams every night of how "four little colored girls had been blown out of a church, and his mission was to approximate as best he could a similar death for four
little white girls . . ." (174) . Milkman also dreams of 154 using the gold to achieve his own ends: "He wanted the money— desperately, he believed— but other than making tracks out of the city, far away from Not Doctor Street, and Sonny's
Shop, and Mary's Place, and Hagar, he could not visualize a life much different from the one he had" (180). When Milkman and Guitar spot a peacock, a flightless bird, neither realizes that he is as weighed down by violence, self- interests, and desire as the peacock is weighed down by his tail, although Guitar observes that the reason why the bird can't fly is that he has "'Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Can't nobody fly with all that shit. Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down'" (180).
The second part of Song of Solomon depicts a physical return to origins in Milkman's flight to his ancestral homeland. However, Morrison does not abandon returns of the repressed as a narrative strategy. Milkman's journey becomes the occasion for confrontation with painful, repressed memories from his personal past. Geography, then, allows
Milkman to reexperience the quest undertaken by Pilate to define herself and to understand his own past as a repetition of his ancestral past. Still, Part II does not open in a straight chronological fashion; Morrison continues to blur past and present. She places Milkman in the woods, headed for Circe's house and as suddenly returns him to conversations that took place before he had ever left his hometown. At the literal level it appears that Milkman's search is a quest for gold. However, this section of the 155 novel depicts the transformation of Milkman's desire and his embrace of Pilate's values. Through these returns of the repressed Milkman begins to see the parallels between his past and his racial and communal history. The return to Pennsylvania and Virginia is an attempt at independence for Milkman, something that he "wanted to do . . . himself," and a means of escape from the claims he felt were being made on his life. The flight is a flight from the constraints of family and shared history:
In the air, away from real life, he felt free, but on the ground, .when he talked to Guitar . . . the wings of all those other people flapped in his face and constrained him. Lena's anger, Corinthians' loose and uncombed hair, matching her slack lips, Ruth's stepped- up surveillance, his father's bottomless greed, Hagar's hollow eyes. (222)
Also, Guitar explains to Milkman that he can "choose to die" for love and that if "[he] can't, [he] can damn well try to"
(225). Within Milkman's return to the immediate past
Morrison employs a return of the repressed for Guitar, instigated by his memory of Pilate, who belittled herself, literally abandoned herself, to have Guitar and Milkman bailed out of jail. When Milkman asks Guitar if he had seen a look similar to the one on Pilate's face as she rescued them, he "remember[s] anew" the look on his mother's face when she received money in recompense for her dead husband:
"More than gratitude was showing in her eyes. More than that. Not love, but a willingness to love. . . . willingness to love the man who was responsible for dividing up his father throughout eternity" (226). Finally, the reality of his communal heritage becomes increasingly apparent to 156
Milkman: "Hearing Pilate talk about caves and woods and earrings on Darling Street or his father talk about cooking wild turkey over the automobile noise of Not Doctor Street, seemed exotic, something from another world and age, and maybe not even true. Here in the parsonage, sitting in a cane-bottom chair near an upright piano and drinking homemade whiskey poured from a mayonnaise jar, it was real" (233).
Milkman learns more about the circumstances of his grandfather's death, how no one had had to catch his murderers because they had never fled from their crime, which they committed with complete impunity. Milkman also begins to learn that his heritage was not entirely composed of violence, that his father had experienced a special closeness and bond with his own father, that "his father had loved him," and that he had an intimate relationship with him
(236). Milkman sees as well that Macon has perverted and mangled his own father's legacy, that something had gone
"wild" in his father when he watched the murder of his own father (236) .
Apart from his emerging acceptance of his ancestral past and his growing sense of connectedness with that past.
Milkman remains unconscious of its importance for understanding his own behavior. Desire for Milkman remains a desire defined by his entrenchment in acquisitive values.
His desire for gold is so fierce that even under the influence of the men in Danville who admired his father and grandfather so much. Milkman experiences a rebirth of his misguided desire: "Suddenly, in the midst of his telling,
[he] wanted the gold. He wanted to get up right then and 157 there and go get it. . , . H e glittered in the light of their adoration and grew fierce with pride" (238) . But Milkman, driven by his father's infectious desire, has failed to recognize the meaning of his grandfather's legacy.
Experiences on the road teach Milkman the extent of violence in black communities, even those black communities outside the reach of Macon and Milkman's world. His confrontations with the men of Shalimar also testify to the power of mimetic desire to fuel reciprocal violence within the community. The men in Danville describe a community, a shared life— the destruction of which signaled the onset of a fatal illness, the desire for revenge and the spread of reciprocal violence. Their stories recount violence they have suffered at the hands of white men. Reverend Cooper tells the story of being run down by policemen's horses in
Philadelphia and of the "knot the size of à walnut" he received from a horse's hoof (235) .
Furthermore, Circe is presented as the inhabitant of a dream world, in part because Milkman experiences her as the archetypal witch of his own personal dream language, and also because she has found a death in life in the house of her former bosses (the murderers of Milkman's grandfather).
Believed dead by Reverend Cooper, Circe exists solely to make certain that the dream house of her white employers is never repaired and crumbles completely. Her sole reason for living is revenge: "And I want to see it all go, make sure it does go, and that nobody fixes it up. I brought the dogs in here to make sure" (249-50). The confusion surrounding Circe's condition— Milkman cannot decide if she is dead or alive and 158 thinks "she had to be dead" (243)— vanishes once we realize that ostensibly Circe is dead, for she has given her life to the pursuit of revenge. In The Odyssey Circe serves as
Odysseus's guide, just as she also represents a potential detour for Odysseus and the threat of forestalling his quest indefinitely; Milkman's Circe also represents entrapment and ensnarement in the desire for revenge. But Milkman is unaware of the value of the information he has received from
Circe concerning the history of his grandfather and grandmother, Jake and Sing. He remains infected with a poisonous desire for "candy and sex and soft twinkling lights" (253) .
Milkman's first exposure to the mysterious rhyme of the singing children occasions a memory of his own childhood, a fight, and his first meeting with Guitar. Ostensibly the memory is of Milkman's separateness and isolation from his peers: "Milkman watched the children. He had never played like that as a child. As soon as he got up off his knees at the window sill, grieving because he could not fly, and went off to school, his velvet suit separated him from other children" (267). Milkman's sense of independence and responsibility translates into an unwillingness to "[evade] .
. . difficulties" and a determination to take risks on his own (274).
A gradual transformation begins to take place in Milkman on the road, from a searching, unshaped, and self-centered individual to an individual with a sense of purpose and responsibility, albeit a sense of responsibility that is still largely self-involved: "He earned the rewards he got 159 here. None of the pleasantness was directed to him because of his father, as it was back home, or his grandfather's memory as it was in Danville. . . . He was his own director"
(263). Nonetheless, Milkman's solipsism and lack of regard for others are evident in his insulting treatment of the residents of Shalimar: "[Milkman] hadn't found them fit enough or good enough to want to know their names, and believed himself too good to tell them his" (269) . Milkman's insolence and the thoughtlessness with which he flaunts his membership in an economic class far above theirs incites the worst kind of violent response in Shalimar's male residents:
"They looked at [Milkman's] skin and saw it was as black as theirs, but they knew he had the heart of the white men who came to pick them up in the trucks when they needed anonymous, faceless laborers" (269). Milkman has yet to shed the status or perspective of the oppressor.
Milkman's growing sense of self is accompanied by a new vision of his relatedness to and responsibility for the people in his life, especially the people in his family. He begins to realize that although until this point he had always felt that he "didn't 'deserve' to hear all the misery and mutual accusations his parents unloaded on him," now he asks himself "why shouldn't his parents tell him their personal problems? If not him, then who?" (280). Moreover,
Milkman recognizes that he has treated Hagar "like a wad of gum after the flavor was gone" (280). Without "his snap-brim hat, his tie, his shoes, his shirt, his three-piece suit . .
. . his watch and his two hundred dollars," Milkman begins to realize the value of his family and community (280) . 160
Milkman's transformation also involves a movement closer to the land and nature; this familiarity with nature aligns him more closely with Pilate and her values and away from his father and his acquisitiveness. In fact. Milkman's return to origins takes the form of a new appreciation for the
"language" of the Shalimar hunters, communication that
Milkman describes as "not language; it was what there was before language. Before things were written down. Language in the time when men and animals did not talk to one another"
(281). More importantly. Milkman believes that knowledge of this "not language" paves the way to a deeper understanding of human nature and "the earth itself" (281) . During his hunting trip with the men of Shalimar, Guitar attempts to murder Milkman for stealing the gold. Yet, even though he is disoriented following Guitar's attack. Milkman is able to find the hunters in the dark easily with an "accurate" sense of direction (283) . He comes away from the experience feeling "comfortable there . . . on the earth" and walking without his limp (284) . The imagery in these passages closely resembles the imagery with which Morrison has depicted Pilate: "Walking [the earth] like he belonged on it; like his legs were stalks, tree trunks, a part of his body that extended down into the rock and soil" (284).
By returning Milkman to Virginia, Morrison is able to place him in situations that will be conducive to returns of the repressed and to working through material from his personal past, a working through that allows for Milkman's transformation and the release of his desire. As Guitar attacks Milkman and as he draws a final breath, he sees 161
"Hagar bending over him in perfect love, in the most intimate sexual gesture imaginable" (282). Once Milkman's education begins, the lessons come rapid fire. Watching the butchering of the bobcat, he recalls and reinterprets the messages he has heard from Guitar and his father. By interrupting the action of the plot with these voices in italics, Morrison emphasizes that Milkman is not simply recalling but re remembering and reexperiencing these voices, which are now imbued with a new meaning. Milkman cannot help but hear:
"It's the condition our condition is in," and "It is about love. What else? " (285). Morrison depends on the integration of the past in the present as a technique for advancing plot, as she does when later in the same passage she incorporates action from the past into the present without italics; as Milkman is about to eat the heart of the bobcat which the hunters have offered to him in order to complete his initiation, Morrison writes, "A peacock soared away and lit on the hood of the blue Buick" (286).
Increasingly Milkman's desire for gold is replaced by a desire to understand his roots and the history of his family:
"It wasn't true what he'd said to Susan Byrd: that it wasn't important to find his people. Ever since Danville, his interest in his own people, not just the people he met, had been growing. Macon Dead, also known as Jake somebody.
Sing. Who were they, and what were they like?" (297).
Piecing together evidence from stories he has heard, shared bits of information about his grandparents and great- grandparents, Milkman slowly begins to understand that their past is his own past, and that understanding their past is 162 the key to his freedom, not gold. He finds that he is
"homesick for [Pilate], for her house, for the very people he had been hell-bent to leave" (303) . His never-exercised powers of empathy are put to use in imagining his mother's plight, in asking himself what if someone told him "'you may walk and live among women, you may even lust after them, but you will not make love for the next twenty years,' how would he feel?" (303) . Moreover, Milkman realizes he has used
Hagar and that his father has "distorted life, bent it, for the sake of gain" (304) .
Milkman's discovery of self is the result of a parallel working through of painful material from both his personal and ancestral past. The story encoded in the children's rhyme represents a return of the repressed, a memory from
Milkman's past that must be deciphered and experienced before Milkman can avoid the pattern of repetition and reciprocal violence. Though Milkman hears the rhyme repeatedly, understanding its meaning requires growth and experience, in addition to a need to process the information from Susan Byrd and the people of Shalimar. Milkman's understanding is accompanied by the excitement we would associate with reexperiencing a repressed memory:
Milkman's scalp began to tingle. Jay the only son of Solomon? Was that Jake the only son of Solomon? Jake. He strained to hear the children. That was one of the people he was looking for. A man named Jake who lived in Shalimar, as did his wife. Sing." (305)
It is clear that Milkman is no longer "looking for" the gold; his desire is now transformed into a search for an understanding of his past and "his people" (307) . Milkman 163 senses that "somewhere in the pile was a gift for him" (308).
And, indeed, this knowledge will be a gift, a boon, and a means to escape violence by embracing his past, violent though it may be, and transcending it as his aunt, Pilate, has transcended it.
In addition, stories recounted by Susan Byrd, a distant relative of Milkman's, act as returns of the repressed that release memories of a trauma close to the heart of his ancestral past. Susan Byrd recalls the legend of Milkman's great-grandfather, Solomon: "according to the story he wasn't running away. He was flying. He flew. You know, like a bird. Just stood up in the fields one day, ran up some hill, spun around a couple of times, and was lifted up in the air. Went right on back to wherever it was he came from" (326).
The story of Milkman's great-grandfather closely parallels Milkman's own history; in fact. Milkman's personal history repeats his ancestral history. The story Susan Byrd tells describes Milkman's irresponsibility toward Hagar and the pain he causes her:
It liked to killed the woman, the wife. I guess you could say "wife." Anyway she's supposed to have screamed out loud for days.... They say she screamed and screamed, lost her mind completely. You don't hear about women like that anymore, but there used to be more— the kind of woman who couldn't live without a particular man. And when the man left, they lost their minds, or died or something. Love, I guess. But I always thought it was trying to take care of children by themselves, you know what I mean? (32 6-27)
However, it is only with the aid of Pilate as his guide that Milkman is able finally to understand the connection between himself and Solomon. After considering whether he 164
"should go home first, or go to Pilate's," Milkman decides to go to Pilate's, where she reinforces, by breaking "a wet green bottle over his head," the idea that "you can't just fly off and leave a body," a lesson Milkman has not yet fully absorbed (335) . The bottle, along with a period of enforced isolation and confinement, has the desired effect: "Something had happened to Hagar. . . . While he dreamt of flying, Hagar was dying. Sweet's silvery voice came back to him: 'Who'd he leave behind?'" (336) . It is not until Pilate is struck by Guitar's bullet that the text is able to name the original, narrative-producing trauma. From a narrative standpoint, Pilate's death reenacts the original trauma— Jake's death at the hands of greedy white farmers who covet his land. For the central character and for the text, Pilate's death at Guitar's hands constitutes the narrative sacrifice that enables the plot to find its cure and for Milkman to attempt flight. Having worked through a net of repetitions to arrive at the reexperiencing of the original trauma, the narrative is now released from plot— the original trauma and its concomitant anxiety are now reexperienced fully by Milkman and by the text. Repression has failed altogether. However, this reenactment of the original trauma returns us to the beginning of the text and to the instances of repetition within the novel that constitute its plot. The narrative itself returns us to its origins and to its beginnings.
Rather than finding meaning only in this final scene, the scene of the discharge of energy stored up in the repetitions, we are returned to middles, beginnings. 165
Song of Solomon demonstrates that Morrison employs a recursive narrative structure built around returns of the repressed and a movement forward to origins. In this novel she rejects a straight linear plot development in favor of a narrative structure that more closely resembles the process of working through familiar in psychoanalysis. Moreover, repetition becomes a more prominent feature of her narratives' progress. Milkman repeats a return to origins that parallels the text's insistence on returning to the past— like the text, Milkman persistently presses forward into the past. The struggle for both Milkman and the text is to escape a violent deferral of the present. No moment in the text could be said to occur more in the "present" than
Milkman's flight into Guitar's arms, for it signifies
Milkman's escape from the violence of the past.
As a result of Milkman's flight into Guitar's arms, into what is obviously a violent confrontation with another member of the community, the purpose of Pilate's "sacrifice" is unclear. Their confrontation suggests that the repetitive cycle of reciprocal violence still holds the characters in thrall. Meant to reestablish order in the community, to end the chain of violence, the scapegoat's sacrifice is enacted.
However, as scapegoat, Pilate does not redeem the community at large; Pilate dies for Milkman. As is frequently the case in Morrison's fiction, the sacrifice of a scapegoat figure is redemptive only for the individual. Morrison reveals that flight is not the answer, that descent into materialistic values leads only to violence. However, in his flight into the arms of his brother, Milkman displays his willingness to 166 die for Pilate, to defend her life with his own. Here, as in
The Bluest Eye and Sula, redemption takes place on an individual level and hope for the salvation of the entire community is minimal. Yet in her first novel, Morrison does not offer a solution for the community, and Sula offers only a glimpse of the pathway to salvation— Nel achieves redemption by falling back on and finding strength in her love for Sula. In contrast. Song of Solomon holds out the promise for the community that it can escape the cycle of violence through a return to the community's original values.
However, because Morrison does not allow us to see the outcome of Guitar and Milkman's struggle, it is a promise only. Nonetheless, Song of Solomon shows how Sula 's
"circles of sorrow" can be replaced by Milkman's surrender to the air. 167
NOTES
^ In "Flying Black: Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Song of Solomon," Clark Norris asserts that "[Morrison's] novels question counterfeit white ideals, social standards that warp the black family and neighborhood, and moral chaos in black America as a consequence of and reflective of the disorder in white America and international conflicts" (55). Norris suggests that "the philosophical essence of Toni Morrison's novels is based on a love, an acceptance, and an embrace of the whole black community regardless of the individual's personal social, moral or political philosophy. In accord with the Black Aesthetic or Black Cultural Nationalism, Morrison's novels eliminate the Western Christian love principle . . . and replace it with a purer love based on human sympathy and compassion that extends to the isolated black human being—one based on the Old Testament. . . . In addition to love, her novels are also about the isolated consciousness accepting and understanding one's self, and accepting one's racial heritage" (61).
2 Barbara Christian writes in "Community and Nature: The Novels of Toni Morrison," that "the contrast in values between the Dead brother and sister is the axis of this third novel of Morrison's. The conflict will attempt to resolve itself in the character Milkman Dead, Macon's son and Pilate's nephew" (72).
^ Like most women in Morrison's novels, Ruth Foster is the victim of oppression. Macon subjects her to both psychological and physical torment. She, in turn, taunts him and attempts to make his life as miserable as she possibly can, searching constantly for ways to achieve little triumphs over her oppressor. She understands, along with Pilate, that her salvation and preservation will come only as a result of her links with the past. Ruth attempts to maintain that link with the past through the water mark and by visiting and talking to her father at his graveside.
^ In "Self, Society, and Myth in Toni Morrison's Fiction," Cynthia Davis argues that in the male-centered vision of Milkman's story, "the myth of heroism traced through the male line allows women to benefit but not to originate" (338). In my view, through Pilate, as pilot, Milkman finds his way to a love and connectedness that gives him both identity and responsibility. Pilate does lead Milkman in many ways, for her model is the model that, if followed, will lead to Milk's recognition. Davis acknowledges this when she describes Pilate as a "female guide figure" for Milkman. She argues that Milkman's heroic movement is more complete than Pilate's, that Milkman achieves a greater self-knowledge. 168
Davis argues that Pilate cannot "complete her 'quest' without Milkman's explanation" and that "she does the right thing, but from intuitive rather than conscious knowledge" (338-39) . As I am arguing here, Pilate's intuition is the product of a deep connectedness to earth, family, and her ancestors. After all, it is her father's command that urges her to collect the dead man's bones and keep them as her inheritance. Pilate, furthermore, inherits that violence, believing as she does that the bones she safeguards are the bones of a white man, potentially the remains of one of her own father's murderers. Does this make Pilate an even more selfless heroine than Milkman, even before the novel has begun? She possesses, as demonstrated by this act, enormous capacity for compassion and forgiveness, a trait she displays for Guitar and Milkman when she bails them out of jail. Davis confirms that Pilate "pulls the individual into the group and recognizes individuality at the same time" and also "forces Milkman to face his responsibility for Hagar's death" (339) . Again, I would argue that when the novel opens Pilate has completed her heroic quest, the details of which she describes in her frequent stories to Milkman. Moreover, in some sense Milkman's quest is merely a repetition of hers. She does not possess an "oddly garbled" sense of mission because she has misinterpreted her inheritance (just because the bones don't belong to her father does not mean that she has not learned compassion, love, and connectedness, but demonstrates that her connectedness is not restricted to family), because her mission is complete. In mythic or archetypal terms she might better be viewed as a wise spirit figure, somehow beyond the confines of quest on an earthly basis. Finally, Davis argues that Pilate does not "both live and know the meaning as [Milkman] does" (339). I would simply suggest that her lifestyle, divorced from the desires and the drives for material possessions that so dominate Macon's life, demonstrate that she has mastered self definition. The references to her own quest reveal that she has achieved flight. Milkman acknowledges this as the reason why he loves her so much and wants only a woman like her.
^ Cynthia Davis observes that
the constant censorship of and intrusion on black life from the surrounding society is emphasized not by specific events so much as by a consistent pattern of misnaming. Power for Morrison is largely the power to name, to define reality and perception. The world of all three novels is distinguished by the discrepancy between name and reality. . . . Blacks are visible to white culture only insofar as they fit its frame of reference and serve its needs. They are consistently reduced and reified, losing their independent reality. (324) 169
That unwillingness to allow blacks their own names is evident in the first Macon Dead's name and in Milkman's nickname. "Most perversely," Davis writes, "even the attempt at rebellion can be shaped by the surrounding culture. The change for 'Doctor Street' (as blacks originally called Mains Avenue) to 'Not Doctor Street' for example, shows a lingering reluctance to accept white naming, but also a recognition of the loss of original power to name. More profoundly, 'the Days,' who take take revenge for white violence, are also reactive, still achieving secondhand identity and initiative" (326) . CHAPTER IV
Quicksand and Chocolate: Cultural Displacement and Narrative Strategy i n Tar Baby
"You write, not because you have the answers . . . because you don't. The only answer you really have is the work you d o ."
From an interview with Toni Morrison in The Charlotte Observer
Toni Morrison quotes I Corinthians 1:1 as the epigraph to Tar Baby : "For it hath been declared unto me of you, my brethren, by them which are of the house of Chloe, that there are contentions among you." Indeed, an examination of oppression and the economic and social pressures it places on black communities has dominated my analysis of Morrison's works. Moreover, the ways in which those pressures manifest themselves in violence and contention within the black community has been made evident. In Tar Baby Morrison continues to be preoccupied with the problem of violence within the black community and with the way in which the pressures to conform to a white value system, characterized by materialism and a lack of respect for community values, now exerts its influence on the members of the community, creating tension and resulting in cultural disorientation and displacement and, ultimately, violence. Morrison herself
170 171
confirms that her novels are concerned with "re— viewing black culture" and with the problem of preserving a cultural
identity rooted in African tradition, beliefs, and values.
She says :
The civilization of black people, which was underneath the white civilization, was there with its own everything. Everything of that civilization was not worth hanging on to, but some of it was, and nothing has taken its place while it is being dismantled. There is a new capitalistic modern American black which is what everybody thought was the ultimate in integration. . . . I think there is some danger in the result of that production. It cannot replace certain essentials from the past. (qtd. in Hawthorne 103)
Thus, at the heart of Morrison's work is the question of how to advance into the future, preserving what is valuable of a culture and value system and abandoning what is destructive and antithetical to survival. In Song of
Solomon, Morrison defines a choice between two paths into the future— on the one hand, Guitar represents a faction within black communities who choose a violent revolution, seeking retribution for the violence done to blacks by their white oppressors in violence and, for the most part, locking the black community into an inescapable cycle of violence. Macon
Dead also represents the wholesale purchase of a value system defined by greed and materialism. On the other hand, Pilate represents a path into the future that retains the positive values of community that offer escape from reciprocal violence and destructive self-hatred.
It is tempting to condemn Guitar's violence and blind reciprocity and Macon's materialism and avarice. Guitar is 172
motivated by a love for his race and a desire to avenge the
wrongs they suffer, while Macon seeks in his own way to
escape bondage and oppression. However, Guitar's philosophy
depends on materialism and wealth; it cannot achieve revenge
without developing the economic means within the very system
that seeks to destroy the black community. Macon Dead's capitalist ideology plunges the community headlong into
competition and envy. By his own admission. Guitar seeks
only to preserve the status quo, the numbers, and to
accomplish this he must adopt the methods and values of his
oppressors.
However, violence simply levels the differences between
victim and victimizer, between the oppressed and their
oppressors— for example, it would be difficult to distinguish
between Macon and greedy white landlords. Finally, Guitar's methods must be rejected— there is, after all, as Morrison
has shown, an alternative: Pilate's doctrine of self-love and
tolerance. Milkman's sojourn, on the other hand, testifies to
the possibility of escaping this self-destructive cycle. He
leaps from the past into the future as Pilate's disciple and
as a deliverer for the race. And, as we have seen, Sula dies
and Pecola lapses into madness, but Nel and Claudia cling
tightly to a threadbare hope. Further, though Song of
Solomon defines the stakes in the characters of Milkman and
Guitar, we know only that the struggle will continue.
Finally, the problem of cultural identity and preservation presented in Morrison's first three novels remains unresolved
in Tar Baby. As a result. Tar Baby is as "open" a text as
Sula or Song of Solomon. Still, without offering a solution. 173
Morrison achieves the clearest definition of the cultural and social dilemma facing African-Americans.
However, distinct differences exist between Tar Baby and her earlier works, in which Morrison confined this dilemma to a specific community. In Tar Baby, Morrison considerably expands the cultural context, setting her novel in the West
Indies and thus implicitly invoking the African Diaspora.
This expanded setting has led one critic to label Tar Baby a
"Diasporean novel" and to suggest that it is "a contemporary re-visioning of racial history, for its evocation of beginnings makes observable the common identity of African people of mainland America and the West Indies, a people that have been identified with separate histories and artificially made different" (Hawthorne 100). Evoking the Diaspora defines the problem of cultural identity in much broader terms and explicitly introduces a vast and rich, African cultural heritage. Moreover, by setting the novel in the
West Indies, Morrison evokes the Middle Passage and the first
American stop for African slaves, thus, placing the novel within the broader history of oppression. This setting specifically prepares us for Morrison's more direct treatment of slavery and oppression in Beloved. Finally, this expanded cultural context makes more immediate the struggle to define cultural identity within the world of the oppressor and brings the dilemma of inter- and intraracial violence into the present.2
Apart from this broader cultural context, Morrison demonstrates that the mechanisms of reciprocal violence 174 persist and that violence within black communities is
initiated by white oppressors. In addition, previously
relegated to the periphery of the text, yet exerting an
enormous influence over the lives of Morrison's characters
and her communities, fully-developed white characters appear
in Tar Baby. Their presence reinforces Morrison's point that violence within the black community can be traced to white domination, and, more specifically, to temptation within the black community to abandon its traditional values in favor of white materialism. In Tar Baby, the character of Valerian
Street, a white candy manufacturer who has come to his home in the Caribbean to retire and who is a cultural self-exile in his own right, represents the white exploiter and oppressor. According to Tar Baby's narrator. Valerian is able to "dismiss with a flutter of the fingers the people whose sugar and cocoa had already allowed him to grow old in regal comfort; although he had taken the sugar and cocoa and paid for it as though it had no value, as though the cutting of cane and the picking of beans was child's play and had no value" (203) . The narrator condemns Valerian and white imperialists, for "they had not the dignity of wild animals who did not eat where they defecated but they could defecate over a whole people and come there to live and defecate some more by tearing up the land" (203) . Valerian, then, is associated with a Eurocentric-patriarchal tradition of domination and oppression, and with white imperialism and exploitation.3 His presence in this novel allows us to trace 175
more easily the destructive effects of that exploitation
among the members of the black community.
Like the violence in Morrison's other novels, violence
in Tar Baby stems from cultural disorientation and is bred
from the desire that exposure to the dominant culture
inspires. Frequently subtle and psychological rather than overt and physical, violence in Morrison's work must be viewed
in its broadest sense, [as including] not only such obvious physical aggressions as rape, battering, or murder, but also such spiritual and psychological assaults as badgering, economic deprivation, domination, and confinement. . . . ; [the] more subtle and probably more enduring forms of violence . . . [such as] the psychological scarring that results from humiliation, verbal abuse, and social and economic constraints tantamount to emotional imprisonment are much more effective means of control than physical abuse." (Ackley xi)
Regardless of the nature of the specific manifestation of violence directed toward and perpetuated within black communities, as Karla Alwes writes, Morrison is concerned with "the point at which self-hatred consumes both oppressor and victim" (94). This all-consuming self-hatred within the black community is the product of desire and white domination. Thus, while Tar Baby may seem a decided departure for Morrison, peopled as it is with white characters and set within a broader cultural context, in many ways it crystallizes the cultural dilemma facing the characters in Morrison's other n o v e l s . ^
Perhaps the most striking difference between this and other Morrison novels is the dominance of a third-person 176 narrator and a more traditional, linear plot. Unlike her previous novels, Tar Baby relies much less on a psychoanalytic narrative model. Nonetheless, Tar Baby still focuses on a return to origins and is shaped around a pattern of repetitions and substitutions. Characters in the novel attempt to define themselves in relation to the past; however, the narrative structure is much less interested in incorporating the past as past within the p r e s e n t.^
Characters are preoccupied with the past or with returning to origins and attempting to find a right end. Repetitions in this novel depict destructive effects of cultural disorientation and displacement and, as such, serve as metonymic substitutions for the novel as a whole. It is through these substitutions that the novel strives to make meaning. For this narrative pattern. Tar Baby is reminiscent of Morrison's earlier works.
In Tar Baby, Morrison rarely departs from a conventional third-person omniscient narrator. Missing are the sudden shifts between tenses evident in the other novels; nonetheless, the plot does double-back on itself to attempt to recapture the past and to offer, through their emerging memories, a defining glance into the characters as cultural orphans and self-exiles. Though a movement back to origins structures the plot and story, the novel relies much less on the recovery of repressed and painful memories of trauma for its organization. When the narrative is interrupted by returns of the repressed, they are much less smoothly integrated into the plot than they are in previous novels and 177 devoted entirely to returns to a more immediate past. For the most part, the returns of the repressed take the form of dreams and memories that interrupt the forward flow of the plot. These dreams interrupt the plot for character development, invariably recalling traumatic events from the characters' pasts: "the wrapped and shelved [problems]— the ones they always meant to take down and open one day— or the ones they caressed every hour" (81). Moreover, these deferrals have the dual purpose of describing the cultural conundrums of the characters, many of whom have been orphaned by or have exiled themselves from their culture. In this regard they serve as metonymies and substitutes for the metaphor of thwarted escapes and cultural misidentity that constitute the novel.
Chapter two is the section of the novel most dependent on this backward-moving plot development and substitution.
The watchful eye of the moon, eavesdropping on the nighttime activities of the residents of the Arbe de la Croix, Valerian
Street's island home and refuge, finds Jadine restless and awake in the middle of the night after having been wakened by a dream of large hats. Jadine is a young black professional woman with a prosperous modeling career who has come to the island home of her white patrons. As she lies sleepless in her bedroom, she recalls the vision of an African woman in yellow she has encountered in a Paris market. The uneasiness
Jadine experiences from this vision defines her status as a cultural self-exile and the strength of her desire to deny her own racial heritage. She struggles to "keep the moonlight out of her eyes, and the woman in yellow out of her 178 mind" (49). Lying in her bed on the Isle de le Chevalier,
Jadine "couldn't figure out why the woman's insulting gesture had derailed her— shaken her out of proportion to incident. Why she had wanted to like and respect her" (47). These
visitations by the moon into the waking thoughts and dreams
of the characters interrupt the linear movement of the plot that originally opened the novel.
Margaret's story of cultural displacement is also
recounted in a deferral of the forward-moving plot. Margaret
is a middle-class beauty queen who suddenly finds herself married to the wealthy candy manufacturer, Valerian Street.
The same inquisitive moon believes Margaret is asleep, but
she is awake and thinking "the ticky-tacky thoughts that fill
in the space where sleep out to be. Rags and swatches; rainclothes and crumpled paper napkins. Old griefs and embarrassments; jealousies and offense. Just common ignoble scraps not deep enough for dreaming and not light enough to dismiss" (55). More importantly, the moon finds Margaret hoping "that she would have the dream she ought to for maybe that would dispel the occasional forgetfulness that plagued her when she forgot the names of and uses of things" (55).
Margaret longs to dream the dream that will give expression to the horrible secrets that she is hiding. She longs for the return of the repressed through dreams, to purge herself of her painful non-memory, the failure to remember that occasions a "thin terror" (55).
Margaret's story is reminiscent of Cholly Breedlove's and demonstrates that abandonment (read "violence") breeds violence, that cultural displacement fosters violence. We 179 learn that Margaret's parents abandoned her for all intents and purposes and left her to make her way with her beauty of which they thought, "well, at least she has that. She won't have to worry" (56). Rooted firmly in a culture that believes in the power of physical beauty "they stepped back and let her be. They gave her care, but they withdrew attention [from] . . . the single beautiful one" (57). The dream Margaret "should" dream will help her to remember burning her son and sticking needles into him, abuse that can be traced directly to the loneliness she feels once she finds herself in a completely foreign class and culture. Her treatment of her son is a direct result of her isolation and feelings of alienation once she has been transplanted into
Valerian's highbrow, upper-class society: "it was just her luck to fall in love with and marry a man who had a house bigger than her elementary school: a house in which there was
"nothing to keep her from feeling drowned when he was not there in the spaciousness of that house with only a colored couple with unfriendly faces to save her" (58-59) .
Valerian's mansion stands in stark contrast to the trailer
Margaret had grown up in and where "the separateness she felt had less room to grow in" (57). Her frustration at finding herself in Valerian's huge mansion translates into violence toward the one she cares about the most and who is least capable of defending himself.^ Thus, Margaret's violence toward her son is rooted in powerlessness and frustration and is clearly reciprocal. 180
As we have seen, Morrison's texts often attempt to repress memories of trauma, though ultimately her plots cannot move forward until the past has been incorporated as past within the text. Similarly, Margaret's inability to remember the names and purposes of things is evidence of the power of the repressed to interject itself into and disrupt daily life. Her story is about moving backward in time, about uncovering what she has buried in her unconscious as a means of moving forward. Once Ondine, Valerian's cook and housekeeper and once Margaret's friend and companion, has revealed her secret, Margaret can have the "unspeakable" dream that she ought to have (235). As a result she experiences the "wonderful relief of public humiliation,"
"the harmony that comes from the the relieved discovery that the jig is up" (235). Moreover, Valerian notices that once
Margaret has confessed, has dreamt her dream, she is "strong, stronger," and even becomes more herself, opting not to hid behind a mask of make-up anymore (237-39) . Eventually
Margaret takes control of the household and begins to care for her husband as if he were her child, as if he were
Michael, as if her were a "a patient, or a baby"--she becomes his "master" (279) . And though it is difficult to call this progress for Margaret, she, nonetheless, successfully incorporates the past as past in the present and is freed from the repression and repetition of her violence toward
Michael.
Margaret's case is interesting from a number of points of view. First, because she is white, she demonstrates that, for whites, displacement out of one's class can produce 181
violence just as potent and horrific as the violence that
results within the black community from cultural
displacement. Margaret's example is also interesting for the direct way in which she is plagued by a past that has been
repressed, a traumatic and violent past that she has buried. Margaret's secret is alluded to, yet withheld, in the text, a strategy familiar from Sula and especially from Song of
Solomon. However, her secret does not emerge in a deferral
of the plot; instead, the scene in which her secret is
revealed takes place within the linear plot. In addition,
Margaret's abuse of her son is overtly physical violence, a kind of violence that is rare in this novel. Finally,
following her victory over the past, Margaret becomes her husband's caretaker, assuming the role of mother for
Valerian, who, as a result of her revelations about Michael, has lapsed into an infantile state. This reversal of roles and exchange of power between Valerian and Margaret suggests a leveling of difference in which the roles of oppressor and oppressed are indistinguishable from each other. This dissolution of difference between social roles signals the advent of social chaos and the continuation of the cycles of violence that, for Girard, characterize the sacrificial crisis. Moreover, their relationship serves as a repetition of the leveling of difference that will occur later between
Sydney as servant and Valerian as master, and, more significantly, of Jadine's choice to abandon her own culture and become a protege of the dominant culture, a choice that flattens the differences between herself as African-American and the white culture. 182
Morrison employs a more familiar narrative strategy in
the case of Valerian Street. While Morrison consistently maintains a third-person narrator in the passages that deal with Valerian, she nonetheless uses his daydreams and memories of the past as a means of advancing the plot.
Moreover, like Margaret, Valerian attempts to relive the past as a means of moving forward. His desire to return to quiescence and a state of inorganicity, to escape the narratable, takes the form of a search for origins. He tries to make sense out of his experiences in retirement by looking back to the past. He transplants himself out of the corporate world and into a self-created, self-controlled environment; "He built the island greenhouse as a place of controlled, ever-flowering life to greet death in" (53). However, his island world is entirely illusory for him, created out of his imagination and peopled by ghosts from his own past.
The past returns at Valerian Street's invitation, and it is through the past that he attempts to understand his present. Valerian retreats into memories of his childhood, even though they do not necessarily represent a better time.
He devotes his time to imagining "what was not so." For example. Valerian builds a washerhouse separate from the main house at Arbe de la Croix, trying to recapture the memory of the washerwoman who "looked like a bird" and who gave him a way to vent his despair when his father died. Easily conjured was the vision of his dead wife, who seemed herself locked into her own past, preoccupied as she was in her visitations with trying to justify her two abortions. 183
Furthermore, in his daydreams, Valerian chooses to revisit
"old friends and childhood playmates," whom he consciously
remembers as better than they were, idealizing his past. Yet
he is also visited by "his own living son" who appeared
"unconjured" in the dining room. He invites Son, to his
table for he has imagined a reconciliation with his own son, a son who will not visit the island now. As Anthony Berrett
writes,
not only does Valerian invite Son, a Southern black castaway who steals away in the Street's house and terrifies Margaret, to his table as a symbolic reconciliation with his own son, but he also seeks insight into his problems by using Son's expressive and musical methods." (282)
Valerian's frequent forays into the past serve as repetitions of the metaphor of thwarted escapes that comprises the novel.
His desire to die in his greenhouse is, he imagines, like his
life: "normal, decent . . . fair, generous" (53). His goal, then, very overtly is to die the way he has imagined himself dying.
Yet even as Valerian attempts to escape into the past, the violence that he originally perpetrated against the
island people as their oppressor now re-visits him. It
levels the difference between him and his "servants" and a clear role reversal takes place. Valerian attempts to guide himself toward his fit end, but his detours begin with the arrival of Son, the failure of his true son to arrive, and the revelation of his wife's abuse of that son. When
Margaret reveals that she has abused their son, the life
Valerian had so desperately wanted to control, the vegetation 184 in his greenhouse and on the island, now runs rampant. He ends, instead, plunged into senility and stupor— he cannot even feed himself and must be fed by Sydney who now exchanges roles with his employer. Sedated and fixated by the Classical music he loves. Valerian retreats into the past and an infantile existence in which he is cared for by his wife and butler. The violence he has visited on his wife by removing her from her cultural roots now revisits him and the cycle of violence is perpetuated. In the case of Sydney and Ondine, Morrison also uses a linear plot and a third-person narrator to depict the repetition of the potential for cultural displacement to produce violence. Above all, Sydney and Ondine never even bother to learn the names of Gideon and Thérèse, the local help who come in to do maintenance and to help with the cooking. Their superior attitude testifies to their isolation and alienation from their own cultural roots, even within the Diaspora. Sydney views himself and Ondine as having progressed beyond performing menial tasks that help like Thérèse and Gideon are much better suited for because of their lowly status: "I don't want you running all over the yard after chickens. Killing them neither. We long past that. Ondine. Long past that" (98). As Barbara Christian has pointed out, "because of their industriousness they label themselves Philadelphia Negroes and see themselves as a cut above their slovenly brethren; in actuality, they are cut off from any community in order to keep their jobs" ("Concepts"
66). When Valerian fires Thérèse and Gideon for stealing apples, Sydney becomes upset not because they have been fired 185
but because it will make managing the household more
difficult. Still, Sydney tries to preserve decorum, worried
foremost about his own position and status. Sydney and Ondine are willing to overlook quite a few
similar shortcomings in their employers to preserve their way
of life. Moreover, to Sydney and Ondine, Son is "a stinking ignorant swamp nigger" and "wild-eyed pervert who sleeps in
women's closets" (100) . Hawthorne rightly shows how "Sydney
and Ondine deny [African] history when they refuse to acknowledge kinship with Son" (106). Susan Willis argues
that for Sydney, the past is irretrievable and remote,
emerging only in nightmares. He is thus cut off from the
"funk," from ever experiencing color and sensual pleasure
(92). Michael Awkward suggests that, in general, attempts by
Afro-Americans to live in accord with white values and
standards of beauty have destructive effects (61). It is this abandonment of values and cultural displacement, so
clearly evident in Sydney and Ondine, that constitutes the
central metaphor at the heart of Morrison's work and that is
the root of the violence that permeates her work.
Most important, by tolerating Margaret's violent treatment of Michael, Ondine is at least implicated in
Margaret's crimes and in this way perpetuates violence. She
is willing to keep her employer's wife's hideous secret in order to preserve her position. Sydney and Ondine succumb to materialism and, as a result, do violence to the child they have adopted. Jadine, Sydney and Ondine's adoptive daughter,
is isolated from her African-American and African roots, an alienation that Sydney and Ondine encourage— Ondine confesses 186 that she never told Jadine anything about African-American traditions or values.^
In passages that remind us of the narrative pattern familiar in her earlier novels, Morrison allows us to eavesdrop on characters and offers us glimpses into their thoughts and their pasts. In her previous works, Morrison uses storytelling to relate characters and their relationship to the past. Or, she uses sometimes confusing shifts in narrative voice to signal narrative returns of the repressed in the text. In Tar Baby, Morrison maintains a third-person narrator even while she returns us to a time past for the characters. Moreover, she confines these narrative returns of the repressed to particular sections of the novel, specifically the earlier sections. The novel is set in the
Diaspora, and thus we would imagine the African presence is more strongly experienced by all of the characters. However, ironically, Morrison's narrative strategy distances readers from that African and African-American presence, just as her characters are distanced from traditional African-American beliefs and values.
Even while Morrison employs a narrative strategy early in the novel to emphasize her characters' isolation from the traditional African-American values, when she begins to develop the character of Son, she introduces a physical manifestation of the past and of a value and belief system that is now inadequate. In Tar Baby, Son is the embodiment of the past, and his presence in the novel constitutes a physical return of the repressed. As the physical embodiment 187 of past traditions. Son heightens the crisis of cultural identity that lies buried within the unconscious of the novel's characters.
The character of Son, a drifter who jumps ship and swims to shore on the Isle de le Chevaliers to hide out in
Valerian Street's island refuge, exerts a powerful force within the narrative by acting as the catalyst for other characters' deferrals; he plays a significant role in the structure of this narrative--as trickster, his presence disrupts the narrative and helps to precipitate the deferrals that generate and are plot. Son becomes the manifestation of the culture and beliefs— the origins— that Jadine, Sydney, and Ondine have repressed.® Son arrives just as Jadine faces her own struggle to discover an identity either within or outside of African-American culture— Son's arrival adds a nev. sense of urgency to Jadine's struggles. In addition, as a result of the tension that Son's presence creates in the
Street household, Margaret's secret abuse of her only son,
Michael, is revealed.
Son brings ashore the values and belief systems of the rural Black South and is closely associated with a strong
African heritage. Morrison draws Son as a sympathetic character in many ways, making his physically beautiful, compassionate and empathetic toward Gideon and Thérèse, homey and bound to the land naturally. Jadine describes Son as having "small dark dogs galloping on silver feet" and
"savannas" in his eyes and as having hair that was
"physically overpowering, like bundles of long whips or 188 lashes that could grab her and beat her to jelly. And would"
(113). The dreams that Son attempts to insert into Jadine's sleep are filled with
yellow houses with white doors which women opened and shouted "Come on in, you honey you!" and the fat black ladies in white dresses minding the pie table in the basement of the church and white sheets flapping on a line and the sound of a six-string guitar plucked after supper while children scooped walnuts off the ground and handed them to her. (119)
His dreams for her are shaped out of these romanticized memories of an idyllic, pastoral Negro life. He attempts to "breathe into her the smell of tar and its shiny consistency" (120). In New York City, Son is nostalgic for his idealized rural South and can not find the black people that he had left behind when he left the States— of the blacks he sees in
New York, he thinks, "If those were the black folks he was carrying around in his heart all those years, who on earth was he?" (215-17). To Son the rest of America "seemed sticky. Loud, red, and sticky" (167), while his "home" in
America was a "separate place that was presided over by wide black women in snowy dresses and was ever dry, green and quiet" (167-68). Also, Son is associated with the chevaliers, slaves who were struck blind when they first saw landfall and who, legend suggests, still roam the island:
"Somewhere in the back of Son's mind one hundred black men on one hundred unshod horses rode blind and naked through the hills and had done so for hundreds of years" (206).
As the incarnation of African-American origins that have been lost or repressed. Son represents the positive values of family connectedness, personal dignity, and the worth of the 189
individual. His treatment of his father and of Thérèse and
Gideon testify to his sense of unity with other members of
his race and responsibility to family. For eight years Son has mailed his father money orders from around the world to
"take care of [him]" (248). Once he returns to his home
town, he reestablishes relationships with old friends easily
(254-55). From this angle Son possesses many of the
traditional values of the rural, black South that Morrison
prizes and feels are the most valuable treasures to be carried into the future.
Even while Son manifests these positive values, he also embodies what is destructive and outmoded about that rural Southern existence. His passion is uncontrollable; whether
or not by accident, he has killed his former wife by driving
a car through her house. He never moves away from the
traditions of Eloe that tolerate this kind of violence toward
women. Peter Erickson points out that Son is clearly
aligned with a destructive "gender polarization" that is
"never decisively repudiated" (30). His views of women are
traditional and sexist— when he thinks of settling down with
Jadine, he worries about "how he would earn money to take
care of her and, later, their children?" (219).^ Moreover, he espouses a specific brand of apartheid, believing that
whites and blacks should not commingle, an attitude that is
finally labeled by Jadine as "white-folks-black-folks primitivism" (275). The glimpses Morrison affords into Son's
roots in Eloe provide ample testimony to Son's narrow, sexist 190
views. He lives by Eloe's laws, but those laws are, in part, the laws of backwardness.
Son represents a cultural "tar baby." The tar baby of traditional folk tales is an attractive snare, and, as
Trudier Harris has pointed out, "when we think of the
folkloristic patterns of interaction in Tar Baby, we usually interpret Jadine and Son as tar babies. Both of them have some irresistible attraction . . . that could potentially bring about their downfall" (119; Harris' italics). Son possesses positive qualities and values that make him attractive, even while his "primitivism" and sexism are liabilities in a changing social s i t u a t i o n . Son's return to Eloe constitutes an enlightening return to origins; he moves backward in time in order to move forward. Through
Jadine's influence he eventually recognizes that he is perhaps too deeply steeped in the past, has clung too tightly to Eloe; in her photographs of the women in Eloe, he sees
"stupid, backwoodsy, dumb, dead" faces (273). As a result he begins to perceive Jadine as his savior from what Jadine describes as a "medieval slave basket"; he begins to see the truth in her assertion that "there is nothing any of us can do about the past but make our own lives better, that's all
I've been trying to help you do. That is the only revenge, for us to get over. Way over" (271; Morrison's italics).
The legendary past, however, proves too sticky a tar baby for Son, who--even as he attempts to find Jadine, to move forward— reenters a world of legend. The opening of Tar
Baby echoes Son's return to the island— as he swims ashore to 191 begin the novel, the water threatens to pull him under: Son cannot reach the shore on his own, but must have the help of women. Yet it is the sea, "like the hand of an insistent woman" and as the "water-lady," that tears him away from the shore (5). Son's battle to reach shore has little meaning as an isolated incident in the plot; it acts as a metonymic substitution for his struggle to be free of a past that threatens and finally succeeds in ensnaring him, whose allure is too great to resist. This metonymic repetition is difficult to infuse with meaning until the novel is complete, until Son and the novel reach their end. Imagined as a woman the sea threatens to swallow him, to pull him down by the ankles into a swirling vortex (4). When Son runs "lickety- split" into the island of the chevaliers, what happens to those positive values that he embodies? Are they sequestered in legend? Are they relegated to myth? In what sense are they carried forward?^
Just as Son is the embodiment of an African/African-
American tradition, Jadine is isolated and alienated from those traditions. Like her precursors, Geraldine and Polly
Breedlove in The Bluest Eye and Helene Wright in Sula, Jadine believes she must suppress the funk. But, once Son arrives, she suffers a crisis of cultural identity which she can no longer ignore.As a young, beautiful and successful fashion model, raised in European tradition under the patronage of Valerian Street, Jadine has had very little exposure to an African or African-American heritage or values. Jadine declares that black life is "not all grits and 192 natural grace" and admits she was upset for a time with herself for "liking 'Ave Maria' better than gospel music"
(74). Still, her encounter with the African Woman in yellow has "derailed her— shaken her out of proportion to incident"
(47) and made her feel "lonely and inauthentic" (48). That
Jadine longs for acceptance within the African-American community and seeks connectedness with an African tradition is evident in her desire to be liked and respected by the
African woman (47). Consciously, her crisis of identity manifests itself in worries that the "White but European" man that she has planned to marry may only want to marry "any black girl who looks like me, talks and acts like me" (48).
"What will happen," she worries, "when he learns that I hate ear hoops, that I don't have to straighten my hair, that
Mingus puts me to sleep, that sometimes I want to get out of my skin and be only the person inside— not American— not black— just me?" (48). Finally, Jadine would rather avoid questions of color and does not like the way that "Margaret stirred her into blackening up or universalizing out, always alluding to or fettering out what she believed were racial characteristics" (64). She cannot face those questions of racial identity easily. They disturb her, and she is aware that she feels disloyal at times, feels "a curious embarrassment in the picture of herself telling on a black man to a white man and then watching those red-necked gendarmes zoom him away in a boat" (126).
As a result of her isolation from African-American culture and her upbringing in a Eurocentric, upper-class tradition, Jadine rejects Son's values and the lifestyle of 193 the rural black South and believes that
Eloe was rotten and more boring than ever. A burnt-out place. There was no life there. Maybe a past but definitely no future and finally there was no interest. All that Southern small-town country romanticism was a lie, a joke, a secret kept by people who could not function elsewhere. An excuse to fish. (259)
She believes that the lifestyle, values, and behavior in Eloe are "paleolithic" (257). In Eloe, she thinks, "I am stuck here with a pack of Neanderthals who think sex is dirty or strange or something" (257) and "might as well have been in a cave, a grave, the dark womb of the earth" (252). Trudier
Harris argues that "the inculcation of [Jadine's] values for self-improvement do not have negative implications in the abstract, but when [she] tries to associate with other black people on practical levels, as in Eloe, it is clear that, for her, difference has also meant permanent spiritual separation" (130) .
In fact, Jadine not only abandons her blackness, but she is actively repulsed by it: "[Son] had jangled something in her that was so repulsive, so awful, and he had managed to make her feel that the thing that repelled her was not in him, but in her. That was why she was ashamed. He was the one who smelled. Rife, ripe. But she was the one who wanted to smell. Like an animal" (123). Jadine doesn't want
Valerian to discover that "there is something in [her] to smell . . . and no sealskin coat or million-dollar earrings can disguise it" (125). She finds refuge from her "smell" within the white culture, with whom she says "the rules were 194 even simpler. She needed only to be stunning, and to convince them she was not as smart as they were" (126-27).
In Jadine's defense, however, it must be argued that when she rejects Son and the negative beliefs he represents— the apartheid, sexism, and traditional gender roles evident in Eloe— she rejects values that are maladaptive for a changing social situation. Sandra Pacquet writes that in
Eloe "Jadine finds her sexual freedom curtailed and feels obscene, because within the hierarchy of Eloe, the ancestral role of women as nurturers, as guardians of the hearth and moral values of the community, is also the preservation of male dominance" (511). Moreover, "rather than attempting to escape part of her identity, [Jadine] has merely sought to define herself with the criteria she has identified as important" (Samuels and Hudson-Weems 82). Finally, Jadine argues that she "was learning to live in this world. The one we live in, not the one in your head. Not that dump Eloe; this world" (264) .
Because Jadine is on a path to "self-improvement," it is possible to view Son as a tar baby that detours Jadine's plot. That Son is a tar baby capable of waylaying Jadine's plot is evident in the scene in which Jadine wanders into quicksand on that part of the island she had always thought of as ugly:
She walked toward it and sank up to her knees. She dropped the pad and charcoal and grabbed the waist of a tree which shivered in her arms and swayed as though it wanted to dance with her. She struggled to lift her feet and sank an inch or two farther down into the moss-covered jelly. The pad with Son's face badly sketched on it looked up at her and the women hanging in the trees looked down at her. (182) 195
She wants to "cling together like lovers" with the tree she believes will help her escape. And Jadine finally does free herself with the help of the trees; however, she hurries to wash off the "pitch" (184) that comes to be associated with
Son and with what Dorothea Mbalia calls "African traditionalism" (82) .
With Jadine, Morrison maintains her narrative strategy of returning to origins as a means of advancing plot and of allowing characters to work through problematic material.
Jadine returns to Eloe with Son, and just as the trip is a return to origins for him, it brings Jadine into close contact with the "traditionalism" that by implication she has rejected. Late at night when Son enters her room, the door is left open and Jadine's past enters through a dream:
Rosa and Thérèse and Son's dead mother and Sally Sarah Sadie Brown and Ondine and Soldier's wife Ellen and Francine from the mental institution and her own dead mother and even the woman in yellow. All there crowding into the room. Some of them she did not know, recognize, but they were all there spoiling her love-making, taking away her sex like succubi, but not his. (258)
The women Jadine encounters in this dream are the women of her own past and present--her own biological mother, Nanadine, her surrogate mother, and all the women of Eloe.
The persistence and hostility of the ghost women she encounters give voice to Jadine's struggle to free herself from African traditionalism and gender stereotypes, but they also represent Jadine's problems with her orphan status, her sense of loss for her mother, and perhaps her sense of 196 obligation to her adoptive parents. Also, to Jadine the woman's world to which her ghosts belong is a world that unequivocally dismisses any notions of independence for women; their world is archaic and sexist. Her rejection of them is a rejection in part of her origins. Deferring to Son and the ghost women would mean buying unreservedly into the world of her ghost women— settling for "wifely competence when she could be almighty." The ghost mothers, including Nanadine and the rest, are her tar babies. They are the sticky black past in which she could become mired if she isn't careful, just as Son was her tar baby— she would have to wash him off, stinging and stinking, with gasoline.
Similarly, as Lauren Lepow writes, "the African 'woman in yellow,' whose apparent contempt for Jadine so unsettles her in Paris, is really, with her 'skin like tar,' a tar baby to
Jadine: a dazzling temptation, but actually a trap, an illusion, not a valid object of desire or emulation" (374).
Nonetheless, Jadine's identification with a
Eurocentric/patriarchal tradition and her rejection of more positive, traditional African and African-American values, and the resulting self-hatred, translate into violence toward other members of her race, her adoptive family(ies), and her ancestors. In the narrator's estimation, Jadine had
"defended [Valerian]. Poured his wine, offered him a helping of this, a dab of that and smiled when she did not have to .
. . basking in the cold light that came from one of the killers of the world" (204). In addition, Jadine objectifies the people of Eloe, and trivializes their lives by making them the subject of her photographs: "Son didn't mean to 197
snatch it. Just to end it somehow. Stop the crease, the
sunlight, the click, click, click" (251) .
Jadine also violates the trust and good intentions of her aunt and uncle, and treats Thérèse and Gideon deplorably.
To Ondine's suggestion that "a daughter is a woman that cares
about where she come from and takes care of them that took care of her," Jadine can only reply by refusing to care for her aunt and uncle after they have sacrificed themselves for her: "You are asking me to parent you. Please don't I can't do that now" (281) . Taking care of elders is a highly charged issue for Morrison, who has given powerful testimony to her experience of the black community as a neighborhood:
And there was this life-giving, very, very strong sustenance that people got from the neighborhood . . . . And legal responsibilities, all the responsibilities of that agencies now have, were the responsibilities of the neighborhood. So that people were taken care of, or locked up or whatever. If they were sick, other people took care of them; if they needed something to eat, other people took care of them; if they were old, other people took care of them. (qtd. in Erickson 20)
To abandon her adoptive parents is to violate one of the basic precepts of the value system within the African-
American community.
However, perhaps the greatest crime that Jadine commits is the violence she visits on herself; according to Angelita
Reyes, "Morrison makes very clear what she believes to be the primary source of the victimization of women, especially of black women. It is a different, perhaps more brutal, type of rape because it penetrates and infects women with a 198 paralyzing disease whose chief symptom is self-hatred. She becomes, in essence, both victim and victimizer" (97). Thus,
Jadine belongs to that line of women and men in Morrison's other novels, who, because they succumb to the allure of the dominant culture's values and beliefs and the perceived rewards of identifying with that culture, end up hating themselves and doing violence to other members of their c o m m u n i t y . The destructive effects of adopting the culture of the "Other" are well-chronicled in The Bluest Eye and Song of Solomon.
According to Morrison, high-yellow Jade, cut off from all the funk and blackness of her past, essentially bought and raised by a white man, cannot be the woman Son needs her to be-- she can't live with him in the briar patch; and he cannot live without her. The tar baby and the rabbit lock in fatal embrace, (qtd. in Samuels and Hudson-Weems 86).
Neither finds the middle ground; Jadine returns to a purely
Western, male-dominated culture where she is objectified, and
Son returns to a mythic, legendary, and unreal past. Each one believed that they held the key to the salvation of the other: "She thought she was rescuing him from the night women who wanted him for themselves, wanted him feeling superior in his cradle [Eloe], deferring to him. . . . He thought he was rescuing her from Valerian, meaning them, the aliens, the people who in a mere three hundred years had killed a world three million years old" (269). And in part they are right, for Morrison's narrator tells us that one of them, Son, "had a past," while the other had a "future"— "each one bore the 199 culture to save the race in his hands" (259). Thus, the ending of Morrison's novel is inconclusive.
Tar Baby seems a decided departure from her previous novels. At the narrative level. Tar Baby seems to rely less on a narrative strategy that moves forward by recapturing, reliving the past. However, I have shown that Morrison's narrative still depends on a pattern of repetitions and metonymic substitutions. In Reading for the Plot, Brooks describes narrative as a "model that begins with a blinded and collapsed, inactive metaphor, unpacks the givens of this initial figure through the enactments of metonymy, then reaches a terminal enlightened, transactive metaphor" (323).
The opening images of Son struggling toward an uncertain shore, fighting the undertow, climbing aboard Jadine and
Margaret's boat, and finally landing on the Isle de la
Chevaliers, provides the collapsed and inactive metaphor for this novel of thwarted escapes and tar babies. This beginning is repeated as the final image of the novel, when
Son is directed, by a blind Thérèse, to the "wrong" side of the island. However, Son's presence in the novel as a character who embodies the past demonstrates that a tendency of the narrative structure has become an overt thematic preoccupation.
Morrison's Tar Baby occupies a pivotal position in her canon as the work that most clearly defines the problem at the center of all of her novels.Understanding the dilemma that Jadine faces brings us closer to understanding how
Morrison interprets the problems facing African-Americans who 200
live in a society dominated by whites and their ideals, and how she views the pressures on African-Americans to forego
their heritage in favor of the dominant culture's. In Tar
Baby, the relationship between oppressor and oppressed is perhaps more subtle, yet, as an attempt to work out this problem, the novel moves closer to identifying the origins of violence in the black community as the exploitation of blacks by the dominant white culture. For example, the presence of white characters in the novel and the patron relationship between Jadine and the Streets throw into relief the destructiveness of a decision like Jadine's, and Sydney and
Ondine's, to participate in white culture and to lose contact with an African-American heritage.
Just as she does in her other novels, Morrison explores the problem of deciding what of a traditional African- American heritage to retain and what to discard as destructive and maladaptive for a changing social order. By allowing Sydney to assume Valerian's role as master, Morrison suggests that a simple reversal of roles is not a workable or desirable solution. And for its destructive effects,
Jadine's relationship with the Streets is reminiscent of
Polly Breedlove's relationship with her white employers in
The Bluest Eye. Nonetheless, even though Morrison refuses to offer a definitive solution to this problem, she does point to the past and traditional African-American values as the key to moving into the future successfully. Critical reception to the novel testifies to the fact that Morrison has more or less stacked the deck against Jadine. Pacquet eloquently describes Jadine as a woman "very much about the 201 business of shaping her own identity" (512). However,
Morrison herself has pointed out that self-reliance "is not enough" (512) : "Nice things don't always happen to the totally self-reliant if there is no conscious historical connection" (qtd. in Pacquet 512). Son, on the other hand, the character most closely tied to the past and to African- American tradition, has a link to the positive values of tolerance and respect, but serves equally as a reminder of the beliefs that must be discarded. Ultimately both characters become the readers' tar babies, offering tempting but finally unworkable choices.
Peter Brooks writes that
ends, it seems, have become difficult to achieve. In their absence, or their permanent deferral, one is condemned to playing: to concocting endgames, playing in anticipation of a terminal structuring moment of revelation that never comes, creating the space of an as-if, a fiction of finality. (313)
Brooks suggests that "when ending comes, it is more in the nature of stalemate than victory" (314). The most that we can expect from Morrison's novel is this series of indeterminate repetitions that refuse to terminate, opting instead to define a problem, to delineate the sides of a question for which there is no easy answer, to produce, in essence, a "stalemate." And while it is possible to glimpse in Morrison's presentation of this problem that reincorporating the past offers the best solution for how to move forward into the future, it is not until Beloved that
Morrison's characters successfully relive and reintegrate the 202 past and escape the violence that ravages the lives of black individuals and communities. 203
NOTES
^ Sandra Paquet writes in "The Ancestor as Foundation in Their Eyes Were Watching God and Tar Baby," that Tar Baby "offers no solutions. Instead it maps, through its myriad characters, the ongoing interaction of conflicting ideologies which, though unresolved, continually present opportunities for metamorphosis in individuals and in the society at large" (501). Though it explores the consequences of abandoning one's own cultural heritage, and describes the violent consequences of cultural chaos, as Sandra Paquet writes, "Morrison makes no attempt to resolve the ideological, social, and political conflicts that are embodied in [Tar Baby ]" (513).
^ According to Susan Willis, the problem facing African- Americans "is how to maintain an Afro-American cultural heritage once the relationship to the black rural South has been stretched thin over distance and generations" (85) . Similarly, Angelita Reyes argues in "Ancient Properties in the New World: The Paradox of the Other in Toni Morrison's Tar Baby," that the theme implicit in Morrison's novel can be summarized as "Black people in the New World Diaspora must not lose sight of their African consciousness" (19). Susan Willis also argues that Morrison's novels are set in periods of crucial cultural and social transformation for blacks : "And Tar Baby . . . is best characterized as a novel of the eighties, in which the route back to cultural origins is very long and tenuous, making many individuals cultural exiles" (85-86) .
^ Evelyn Hawthorne asserts that "from his island vantage. Valerian is very much an 'emperor' as his name suggests. He owns everything, and his possessions are land and people" (102). Hawthorne also shows how Valerian reflects "an older history of discovery and conquest" and how his "treatment of the land is exploitative and wasteful" (102) . Valerian, she argues, is "mindless about the land itself" and suggests that his "entrepreneurial activities, his new rapings of the land, represent the continuation of an exploitation which runs through time" (102-03).
^ Peter Erickson rightly asserts that Tar Baby is much less a departure for Morrison than most critics make it out to be. Indeed, in my opinion. Tar Baby contends with the struggle to define an identity as a black woman among a number of forces; it deals with the draw of the dominant white culture and the choices the black woman must make between success as it is defined by that culture and the kinds of sacrifices that must be made in order to achieve that success. Ultimately the novel seeks a middle ground of cultural orientation that lies 204
somewhere between Son's "primitivism" [Jadine's terms] and the disconnectedness that isolates and confuses Jadine.
5 Susan Willis writes that "neither Morrison's use of metaphor, nor her general drive to return to origins is rooted in a nostalgia for the past. Rather, the metaphoric rendition of past experience represents a process for coming to grips with historical transition. Migration to the North signifies more than a confrontation with (and contamination by) the white world. It implies a transition in social class— its ideology and lifestyle. . . . This is true of Tar Baby in which notions of bourgeois morality and attitudes concerning the proper education and role of women have created a contemporary 'tar baby,' a black woman in cultural limbo."
^ See Barbara Christian, "The Concepts of Class in the Novels of Toni Morrison," for a discussion of the ways in which other characters in Tar Baby are bound by class and class consciousness. Margaret's example is also interesting for the direct way in which she is plagued by a past that has been repressed, a traumatic and violent past that she has buried. Margaret's secret is alluded to, yet withheld, in the text, a strategy familiar from Sula and especially from Song of Solomon. However, her secret does not emerge in a deferral of the plot; instead, the scene in which her secret is revealed is integrated into the plot. Finally, Margaret's abuse of her son is overtly physical violence, a kind of violence that is rare in this novel.
^ Ironically, Sydney and Son are more alike than at first might be suspected. Both are entrenched in traditional notions of male-female roles and in a kind of apartheid. Just as Son sees his role as protecting Jadine, Sydney is protective of his wife and his adopted niece. He blows up when Son is discovered hiding in Margaret's closet; his reaction is one of outrage and indignation and demonstrates a kind of protectivism that heralds primitivism. His desire is to protect— traditionally this is what men feel their primary responsibility is, right, to protect their defenseless wives, the homestead? Sandra Pacquet identifies the problem as a somewhat backward approach to race politics and sees Son as someone who "[voices] his own brand of apartheid: 'white folks and black folks should not sit down and eat together'" (510) .
® According to Trudier Harris, Jade is also the trickster, a sticky thing for Son. As trickster. Jade "wants to trick Son into acceptance of the emasculating (for black males) values of the American economic and social system" (Fiction and Folklore 125). In Eloe, Jadine also exhibits some of the 205 trickster's characteristics, for she "plays in the garden (with the camera and her attitudes), is there only because of the value she places on Son, takes what he has to offer (sex, a temporary diversion from her boredom), tries to reshape him, and leaves when he proves intractable" (125) .
^ Critics have thoroughly explored the ways that Son embodies the best and the worst of African-American and African tradition. Wilfred Samuels and Clenora Hudson-Weems assert in Toni Morrison that Son's dreadlocks "affirm the African heritage within which he is so firmly rooted" (82). And Sandra Pacquet writes that Son is "the embodiment of the folk . . . with 'spaces, mountains, savannas in his eyes'"--eyes that distract Jadine from the woman in yellow's 'original insult' of contempt for her rootlessness, . . . Toni Morrison's free man in the tradition of Cholly Breedlove and Ajax" (509). Joyce Wegs believes that "Toni Morrison explores the primal bonds and beliefs of the village . . . through the character and experience of Son," and writes that "Morrison makes Son the center of a primal consciousness that senses humanity in all things, that talks with plants and animals, calls back the past and the dead, and tries to enter the world of other people's dreams" ("Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon: A Blues Song" 277).
Trudier Harris cites Son's "arrogance" and suggest that "like other tricksters" he is an "uncontained force loosed in a world that respects boundaries" (121). As she also points out. Son is able to switch back and forth between identities, and plays up the black stereotypes, which she argues Morrison emphasizes, and the connection between "blackness, animality, and dirtiness" (120-21) . According to Harris, when he wants to manipulate Valerian, Son chooses to become "the ignorant, hunger-driven, asexual 'coon' running from his own shadow" (121). Barbara Christian argues in "The Concepts of Class in the Novels of Toni Morrison" that "in contrast to Jadine, Son, her lover, is a man totally outside of society, a runaway criminal" (79). Moreover, Christian points out Son's rejection of materialism: "Like Pilate, he resists the materialism of the society" (79). Like Pilate, he has no future, for he really lives in Eloe, a country of the past. More importantly, he refuses to contend with the social forces that deprive him of fulfillment. His solution is to retreat, run, opt out. Although he feels an intense racial identity, he does not join with others to change anything" (79). Finally, Son's world view is "narrowed," according to Lauren Lepow, "by sexism and racism. Son fails to recognize that Jadine is his equal, another imbiber of chocolate, who is as much a tempter and savior as he. Son perceives her as a tar baby, a white man's creation that tempts and entraps him"("Paradise Lost and Found" 371). 206
In Morrison's eyes the past holds the secret to how the race can progress into the future. Morrison has depicted her characters and their relationships to their past and ancestry to suggest that traditional African-American values must be preserved if the race is going to move into the future with a sense of cohesiveness. Barbara Christian has written that "The critical questions that Morrison asks in this novel are whether there is a functional black culture in the present- day West, a contemporary black community that is held together by bonds that work." Moreover, she suggests that Morrison's works ask this question: "Is race in America operating as a communal bond or is it merely an indication of a past history once functional but no longer perceived by contemporary blacks as operative in their responses to each other?" ("Testing the Strength of the Black Cultural Bond" 69]. Nowhere in the body of Morrison's work is this question more evident, drawn in more explicit terms, than in Tar Baby, and especially in the relationship between Jadine and Son.
Trudier Harris argues that Son has "strayed from his best path to one that is antithetical to his very being and eventually ends up on the right path. In returning from New York to the island, and being led to its opposite side by Thérèse, Son arrives at his identity" (146). Finally, Harris argues that Son's return to become one of the number of horsemen has the "same connotations for spiritual rebirth for Son as the tales of flying have for Milkman Dead" (14 7) . It may be that this oversimplifies Milkman's conquest, ascribes to it too unqualified a success; nonetheless, at least Milkman survives in the world, or so we imagine, want to believe— Son does not. Hawthorne argues that Morrison presents Son as a man capable of "making a beginning" and as a character who is "more aware of 'the essentials from the past'" (104). She argues, moreover, that returning to the island is returning to himself, to his own history, after having been "distracted" by Jadine, who "destroys his last nostalgic link with America, Eloe" (104). Thus, according to Hawthorne, Son's own plot has been deferred by Jadine, the tar baby that distracts him form his course toward his right end. Evelyn Hawthorne points to an "optimistic" ending for the novel and Son, who, as she points out, "stood up . . . walked steadier, now steadier" (105) . She warns, however, that the people of the island are "subject to Western hegemony" and thereby qualifies her optimism about his ending. I believe it can be further qualified if we consider that Son has a very long way to go. I would not argue with Hawthorne, however, when she insists that the way will be easier for a man like Son, for his cultural awareness (105) .
The character of Jadine Childs has become the ultimate critical tar baby. Some critics find in Jadine a heroine who adheres to feminist values and who attempts to have it all. 207 even if that does mean rejecting traditional African-American values, both positive and negative. Trudier Harris argues that "Jadine has been happily outside of African-American folk culture all of her life and clearly does not wish to be claimed by anyone who resembles or descends from the inhabitants of a place like Eloe, Florida" (127) . Harris continues by suggesting that "her middle-class upbringing, her schooling, and her profession have all separated her from the masses of black people. The culture she bears is not that with an African base but that with a basis in notions of realizing the American dream" (127) . Moreover, Lauren Lepow asserts that racism and sexism may play a role in why many readers view Jadine as "spoiled and pampered, not heroic nor even likable . . . Why can't a black woman 'have it all'— on her own— and ask for more?" (374) . This assessment of Jadine depends on how the "all" in "have it all" is defined. If one defines having it "all" as success from a narrowly-defined Western, white corporate male sense, then Jadine has it, and one would feel she deserves to have more. However, if having it all means maintaining some connectedness with family and community, with preserving a set of values that places individuals before careers and money, then Jadine falls miserably short of having it all. Morrison would suggest that the sacrifices Jadine makes for this "all" are too great and inappropriate. In fact, many critics condemn Jadine for her outright abandonment of African and African-American cultural and social values. For example, Samuels and Hudson-Weems write that "so divorced is she from black culture, from that which is her legacy as a black American, she thinks of it in strictly stereotypical ways" (80).
Peter Erickson writes that Jadine's "success in articulating and holding to a new definition of black female identity is made to depend heavily on an unfeeling attitude toward the 'parents' who raised her" (20). Among critics such as Barbara Christian, the consensus is that Jadine owes her success to the perseverance of her adoptive aunt and uncle, her success to their toil. Christian criticizes Jadine and writes that "in no way is she a nurturer, not even to her aunt and uncle, who made access to wealth possible by becoming life-long servants to the rich Valerian" (78). Christian suggests that Jadine's definition of "independence for a woman means looking out for herself— she is not concerned with any community or with justice for anyone" (79). Christian argues that Morrison may be describing the dangers for women who "in their search for autonomy, may be taking on patriarchal values" (79).
Erickson also argues that "whereas Sula's violation of communal values is a unique, idiosyncratic act, Jadine's 208 defiance of conventional expectation has an exemplary, generalized force that implies the break-up and complete dissolution of neighborhood ideals. Tar Baby , in this sense, is a work of mourning for the passing of those ideals" (20). Similarly, Susan Willis writes that "for the 'tar baby,' Jadine, fashioned out of the rich white man's indulgence and the notions of culture most appealing to bourgeois America (European education and Paris 'haute couture'), the past is irretrievable and no longer perceived as desirable. As the individual whose cultural exile is the most profound, Jadine is haunted by waking visions, born out of guilt and fear" (92-93).
Sandra Pacquet comments insightfully that "in Tar Baby a folktale is reinvented as a polyphonic novel, exposing conflicts within the African-American community between the inner-self and the outer self, between the self and community. The problem of cultural identity is redefined to reflect a changing historical situation" (512) .
Barbara Christian argues in "Testing the Strength of the Black Cultural Bond: Review of Toni Morrison's Tar Baby," that "finally, both their solutions are individual, not at all applicable to the concrete realities that their brethren must face everyday. At no point does either Son or Jadine act with others to resolve this group dilemma" (69) . CHAPTER V
"a new kind of whitefolks' jungle": Community and Narrative Crisis in Beloved
In Beloved, an unspeakable jungle of voices surrounds the house at 124 Bluestone Road. To quiet those voices from the past Sethe, an escaped slave who takes the life of her daughter. Beloved, to keep her from having to endure the horrors of slavery, must tell her story. As we have seen, Morrison's characters tell their stories both to embrace and to escape long-buried memories of their tortured and horrific past. Within the context of what Morrison has referred to as the "paradox of 're-memory'" (qtd. in Travis 1), Sethe's and all these characters' stories construct personal histories and reconstruct the history and identity of both a community and a people. Yet that paradox of re-memory insists that the survival of the people and the community is shaped by their ability to band together to transcend the past— their power to remember, to embrace, and then to move beyond their tragic history.
As I have shown in my discussion of Morrison's first four novels, her characters and her texts struggle to unearth secrets of an horrific, terrifying past, to dig deep enough to expose the roots of self-destructive violence. In her earlier works, Morrison depicts violent crises within the
209 210 black communities without focusing on economic oppression and slavery as the origin of those crises. Without naming the origins of the crises, she explores how violence within the communities divides their members and sets them against each other and the tendency for members of oppressed communities to displace the anger they feel toward their white oppressors onto each other.
In her first four novels, Morrison concentrates on how the inability to escape the bonds of their horrific history keeps the members of those communities locked in combat with each other. Just as her communities seek escape from their debilitating crisis, her texts seek release from a textual crisis in which repeated returns of the repressed dominate the texts and the lives of the characters, thwarting forward movement of the narrative and forestalling the personal growth of individuals and communities. Morrison's previous works have failed to fully articulate an answer to the question of violence in her communities. Instead she has depicted how, through awareness of the real enemy among them, isolated individual characters are able to refuse participation in the crisis of violence dominating the community and fixing it in the past.
Like Morrison's other novels. Beloved also depicts both a narrative crisis and a communal one. Yet Beloved departs from Morrison's earlier works in its willingness to identify violence among blacks as a direct response to oppression by the dominant white culture. Rather than confining white violence to the margins as she does in her earlier works, with the possible exception of Tar Baby, in Beloved Morrison 211 concentrates on exposing the atrocities of slavery, the systematic, institutionalized oppression that still has the power to generate violence even within communities of freed slaves. Morrison employs a narrative strategy driven by a desire to return to origins, and thus the past and returns of the repressed persist in the text, interrupting the forward movement of the plot. According to Peter Brooks, in narrative, "the return to origins [leads] to the return of the repressed" (Reading for the Plot 12 6 ) . Thus, as Brooks allows us to see, in Morrison's novels, on both a thematic and a narrative level, text and community are trapped in cycles of repetition and reciprocal violence. Unable to pose a solution to the problem of violence in the communities in her earlier works, in Beloved, Morrison goes back four centuries into the history of Africans in America to expose slavery as the source of violence within contemporary
African-American communities. Through focusing on the horrors of slavery, Morrison offers the reenactment of originary violence that frees the community from cycles of reciprocal violence and the narrative from a crisis of difference and deferral. And, finally, what most distinguishes Beloved from
Morrison's earlier works is its insistence on unity and solidarity as the key to survival for African-Americans.
In Beloved, Morrison clearly demonstrates how slavery places pressure on Black slaves, pressure that, in the narrator's words, creates in them "a new kind of whitefolks' jungle" (199). The frustration and guilt from the humiliating experience of having been slaves can find no outlet other than oppressing equally powerless members of 212 their own community. Thus, violence instigated by whites
spreads within black communities of its own accord, taking on a life of its own. Stamp Paid, an ex-slave who was willing part from his family to preserve their lives, claims that
The more colored people spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn't the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place. It was the jungle that whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread. In, through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it. Touched them every one. (198-99)
The power of slavery to pervert and twist emotions within the community is evident in the crisis that ensues within the community of blacks in Cincinnati.^ Morrison shows how the threat of white violence has conditioned former slaves not to attach themselves too strongly to the things they love. Within the "wonderful lie" of Sweet Home, the farm where he and Sethe had been slaves, Paul D says the only safe love was a "little love," the only possibility was
"loving small and in secret" (221) .
Thus, the general conditions of slavery, in which it is dangerous to love too strongly, are responsible for the violent crisis at the heart of Beloved. Within the community surrounding 124, the crisis begins with Baby Suggs, the mother of Sethe's lost husband, and her overgenerous expression of love, with the "reckless generosity on display at 124" (137). The litany of Baby Suggs' talents includes
"loving" three times— it is loving too strongly, with such abandon that creates tension within the community (137) . 213
Within the context of slavery, for slaves to love too fiercely is dangerous and potentially ruinous. Thus, Baby
Suggs' "bounty" meets with the disapproval of the community:
"Too much, they thought. Where does she get it all. Baby
Suggs, holy? Why is she and hers always at the center of things? How come she always knows exactly what to do and when?" (137) . The celebration at 124 that disrupts the
community commemorates Sethe's successful escape from slavery and crowns her efforts to bring her children out of slavery. Paul D recognizes that Sethe's particular brand of love was a
love that "could cleave the bone" (154) . To Paul D's claims that her love is "too thick," Sethe responds that "thin love ain't love at all" (164). Paul D believes that, as a slave, more than "what Sethe had done," "what she claimed"— a "too thick love"--was dangerous and "scary" (164).
Slavery established conditions such that the risks involved with growing too attached to family members, children, husbands— anyone or anything--were simply too great, the potential for loss too high. Beloved demonstrates how, when members of the black community violate this unwritten law, and seem to love unwisely, resentment and animosity grow within the community, spreading violence that can be attributed to slavery within the community of free, yet still oppressed, b l a c k s . ^ Baby Suggs tells "how it began," how the community was thrown into contention by the women at 124 who did not know when to stop, who, by enjoying their good fortune with too much show and too much pride, turned all of the community against them. The members of 214 community
woke up the next morning and remembered the meal-fried perch that Stamp Paid had handled with a hickory twig, holding his left palm out against the spit and pop of boiling grease; the corn pudding made with cream, tired, overfed children asleep in the grass, tiny bones of roasted rabbit still in their hands— and they got angry. (137)
Once the community's ire is roused, their resentment of Baby
Suggs emerges; her neighbors complain that
Loaves and fishes were His powers— they did not belong to an ex-slave who had probably never carried one hundred pounds to the scale, or picked okra with a baby on her back. Who had never been lashed by a ten-year- old boy as God knows they had. Who had not even escaped slavery— who had been bought out of it by a doting son and riven to the Ohio River in a wagon. (137)
The community finds in Baby Suggs a suitable target for the anger and frustration they harbor as a result of their mistreatment as slaves: her willingness to love recklessly
"made them furious" (137). As a result, because they are willing to project their anger. Beloved's murder can be traced directly to the community's refusal to warn Sethe that the slavecatchers were returning to take her and her children back to Kentucky, Sweet Home, and the humiliation and torment of slavery.3 Stamp Paid decides that he is going to tell
Paul D "about the party, too, because that explained why nobody ran on ahead; why nobody sent a fleet-footed son to cut 'cross a field soon as they saw the four horses in town hitched for watering while the riders asked questions" (157).
Though Sethe's crime against Beloved is the most horrible, the way for it is paved by the conditions within the 215 community that allow the townspeople to forego warning Sethe about the imminent arrival of the slave catchers.
The crisis within the community surrounding 124 Bluestone Road manifests itself in a loss of distinctions among its members. René Girard writes that the sacrificial crisis is characterized by a loss of individuality and identity "that gives birth to fierce rivalries and sets members of the same family or social group at one another's throats" (Violence and the Sacred 49). Institutionalized slavery itself tended to disallow individuality and to categorize African-Americans as a group without individual traits. More often than not, slave owners denied slaves their very humanity. This tendency is evident in Beloved where
"schoolteacher," a slavemaster at the Sweet Home where Sethe and Paul D were slaves, carefully classifies the animal and human traits of his slaves.
The crisis of difference and the cycle of reciprocal violence is set in motion by slavery. Within the community around 124, initially the difference between the community and its victimizers is effaced when the community begins to target its own members, ostracizing and isolating Sethe and
Baby Suggs. Difference is further effaced when individuals within the community begin to lose their defining traits.
For example. Stamp Paid earns the right to enter any home in the community without knocking or announcing himself because of his willingness to run slaves and to sacrifice himself for their safety. However, once Beloved arrives and the crisis in the community begins to escalate. Stamp Paid loses his distinct privileges within the community and hesitates before 216 he enters 124. Also, when Beloved's desire for Paul D begins to move him around and eventually out of the house, he begins to question his manhood, to wonder how he can call himself a man when "he, that man, who had walked from Georgia to
Delaware, who could not not go or stay put where he wanted to in 124— shame" (126) . As a result of Baby Suggs' and then Sethe's crimes, animosity and suspicion develop within the community, threatening social institutions and eroding values and mores. When Paul D finally leaves 124, unable to understand or accept Sethe's rationale for killing Beloved, he ends up sleeping in the church's cold and damp cellar. When he learns about Paul D's situation. Stamp Paid becomes incensed and confronts Ella about why no one has offered Paul D work or a bed to sleep in: "Why he have to ask? Can't nobody offer? What's going on? Since when a black man come to town have to sleep in a cellar like a dog?" (186) . Sethe's and Baby
Suggs' transgressions thus engender a range of breaches of acceptable social conduct within the community.
Further evidence of the crisis within the community appears in the townsfolks' response to Baby Suggs' resignation as the community's religious leader. Once the white slavecatchers "came in [her] yard" and Sethe murders
Beloved, Baby Suggs claims that "the whitefolks had won" and that the Word that she had spoken in the Clearing had been taken from her (178-79). Because she believes that there is nothing more she can do against the white community. Baby
Suggs, whom Stamp Paid believed to be a "mountain" of a woman
(180), relinquishes her position as what Dorothea Mbalia has 217 called "an unchurched preacher" for her people (92). As the community's religious leader. Baby Suggs had served a vital function within the community by forging bonds of friendship and solidarity, primarily by providing a means of releasing and sharing the grief and pain of their oppression, the terror and denial of their collective lives as victims of oppression. 4^
Baby Suggs' gatherings in the Clearing serve as opportunities for members of the community to purge the buried memories of pain from their former lives as slaves and the present pain that they experience as members of an economically and socially oppressed class. Dorothea Mbalia writes that Baby Suggs had devoted "her life to loving
African people and encouraging them to love themselves" (92) .
When Baby Suggs fails to appear at the Clearing where she had held her services, the community's religious underpinnings falter, threatening the community with a deepening of the crisis. Girard writes that
When the religious framework of a society starts to totter, . . . the whole cultural foundation of the society is put in jeopardy. The institutions lose their vitality; . . . social values are rapidly eroded, and the whole cultural structure seems on the verge of collapse. (49)
A deepening of the crisis is also evident in the community's response to Baby Suggs' death. The narrator tells us that "Baby Suggs, holy, having devoted her freed life to harmony, was buried amid a regular dance of pride, fear, condemnation, and spite. Just about everybody in town was longing for Sethe to come on difficult times. Her 218 outrageous claim, her self-sufficiency seemed to demand it"
(171). Even Stamp Paid, a faithful friend to 124, "who had not felt a trickle of meanness his whole adult life," helps to perpetuate violence within the community: he wonders "if some of the 'pride goeth before a fall' expectations of the townsfolk had rubbed off on him anyhow— which would explain why he had not considered Sethe's feelings or Denver's needs when he showed Paul D the clipping" describing Sethe's murder of Beloved (171) . Thus, Stamp Paid and all the townsfolk are entangled in the cycles of violence that threaten their community. The victimization of Sethe's other daughter, Denver, and the collapse of difference between Sethe, Denver, and Beloved provide further evidence of the crisis within the community and within the house at 124. Sethe's violence toward Beloved initiates a chain of violence that extends throughout the community and within her own family. Denver suffers from her mother's status as outcast in the community; when Paul D arrives at 124 after eighteen years of wandering, a space opens up between Denver and her mother: "Now her mother was upstairs with the man who had gotten rid of the only other company she had. Denver dipped a bit of bread into the jelly. Slowly, methodically, miserably she ate it" (19).^
Denver had relied on the company of her brothers, who, by the time Paul D arrives, had run off, fearing that their mother was capable of slashing their throats just as she had slashed their baby sister's and dreading the wrath of their sister's ghost. Denver's isolation drives her deep into her own world 219
within an "emerald closet" of boxwoods: "In that bower,
closed off from the hurt of the hurt world, Denver's
imagination produced its own hunger and its own food, which she badly needed because loneliness wore her out. Wore her
out” (28-29; Morrison's italics). Denver suffers other losses
as a result of her mother's act, namely the death of her
paternal grandmother. Baby Suggs, whose stories Denver had
relished. Moreover, according to Martha Kubala, Sethe's
refusal or inability to "remember the past or pass it on to Denver . . . has stifled Denver's growth" (6).
With the appearance of Beloved, the ghost of Sethe's murdered daughter, and Paul D, the crisis of difference
extends to the realms between the living and the dead, between a past believed to be dead and the present, and among
the roles within Sethe's family. As the embodiment of the past. Beloved's presence collapses the difference between
time-past and time-present.® In a sense, Paul D is also a
ghost from the past, a victim of the system of slavery, who
turns up on Sethe's doorstep. However, with the appearance
of Beloved, the crisis of difference infects Sethe, Denver,
and Beloved, whose identities and roles within the family begin to shift and merge. Sethe sustains her role as mother until she acknowledges that Beloved is her daughter, at which point their roles as mother and daughter begin to blur.
Once Sethe acknowledges that the possessive and demanding Beloved is indeed her daughter, the only decipherable word in the jungle of voices surrounding 124 is
"mine." Beloved's demands will not be denied: "When once or 220 twice Sethe tried to assert herself— be the unquestionable mother whose word was law and who knew what was best— Beloved slammed things, wiped the table clean of plates, threw salt on the floor, broke a windowpane" (242) . Meanwhile, Beloved
"ate up [Sethe's] life, took it, swelled up with it, grew taller on it. And the older woman yielded it up without a murmur" (250). To meet Beloved's ever-growing demands for her attention, for her very life, Sethe quits going to work and abandons her role as mother and caretaker of the family.
Eventually, their identities merge so drastically that Denver struggles to "tell who was who" (241) . Moreover, recognizing that she and her mother will starve if she does not take the initiative, Denver too exchanges roles with her mother, becoming the caretaker to her dependents: "Neither Sethe nor
Beloved knew or cared about [eating] one way or the other.
They were too busy rationing their strength to fight each other. So it was she [Denver] who had to step off the edge of the world and die because if she didn't, they all would"
(239).
Morrison uses the community's response to Beloved's murder and Baby Suggs' breach of decorum to examine the destructive power of slavery to tear communities apart. It is when the crisis within 124 and the community seems to have reached a peak, that Morrison begins to formulate her response to the question of how black communities can begin to survive the lingering destruction of oppression. While the crisis within the community seems to lessen, the reciprocal violence and collapse of difference within 124 intensify.
When Denver ventures out into the world that is largely 221 foreign to her, she discovers that the community's grudge seems to have worn off of its own accord: "maybe they were sorry for her. Or for Sethe. Maybe they were sorry for the years of their own disdain. . . . In any case, the personal pride, the arrogant claim staked out at 124 seemed to them to have run its course" (249). However, the narrator tells us that "as Denver's outside life improved, her home life deteriorated" (250). The violence within 124 reaches a feverish pitch: "Sometimes [Beloved] screamed 'Rain! Rain!' and clawed her throat until rubies of blood opened there, made brighter by her midnight skin. Then Sethe shouted,
'No!' and knocked over chairs to get to her and wipe the jewels away" (250). Finally, Beloved and Sethe seem to exchange roles completely: "Then it seemed to Denver the thing was done: Beloved bending over Sethe looked the mother,
Sethe the teething child" (250) . Meanwhile the community rallies around Sethe's need, charmed by Denver's unassuming ways. Though they have maintained a grudge against Sethe, the community pulls together to defeat the evil at 124: "when trouble rode bareback among them, quickly, easily they did wnat they could to trip him up" (249).
Morrison's narrative technique in Beloved mirrors the crisis within the community. Thus, on a textual level, both temporal collapse and a blurring of narrative voices echo the collapse of difference within the community. Both the community and the narrative crisis must be resolved before the community can be restored to harmony and the text can escape a plot driven by repetitions of the past in the present. Eventually the reenactment of Sethe's murder of 222
Beloved and Beloved's disappearance serve both as the
community-sanctioned sacrifice to end the community's
violence and the reenactment of trauma that allows the text to escape plot and restore narrative difference.
The crisis within 124 and the community surrounding 124
demonstrates how, throughout Beloved, the past usurps the present, and how the persistence of the past disrupts Sethe's
and the community's growth and struggles for harmony. The non-linear narrative progression within the novel can be compared to, indeed attributed to, Sethe's failed attempts to
forget the past and the power of the repressed to force its way into consciousness.^ Sethe attempts to repress the memories of having murdered her daughter; indeed she struggles to forget everything about her past life as a slave at Sweet Home, the farm in Kentucky from which she has e s c a p e d8 . Sethe tells us that she
worked hard to remember as close to nothing as was safe. Unfortunately her brain was devious. She might be hurrying across a field, running practically .... Then something. The plash of water, the sight of her shoes and stockings awry on the path where she had flung them; or Here Boy lapping in the puddle near her feet, and suddenly there was Sweet Home rolling, rolling, rolling out before her eyes, and although there was not a leaf on that farm that did not make her want to scream, it rolled itself out before her in shameless beauty. (6)
However, sparked by the return of Paul D, Sethe's memories begin erupting into consciousness against her will, thwarting her attempts to forget and interrupting the progress of her daily life. The past, Sethe argues, "comes back whether we want it to or not" (14). Similarly, within the text, the 223 forward movement of the linear plot of Sethe's life is deferred by the eruption of events that took place eighteen years earlier. Thus, the text is subject to a compulsion to repeat the past, and the past struggles to work its way into the consciousness of the text. To escape that compulsion to repeat, Sethe and the text must reenact the traumatic confrontation with schoolteacher and Sethe's subsequent murder of Beloved, the memory of which is too painful and horrible for Sethe to allow into consciousness. Until the text relives the trauma, it, like Morrison's characters, is subject to repetition and trapped in narrative crisis characterized by temporal collapse.
As I have shown, the text's frequent forays into the past, i.e., the frequent returns of a repressed past into the text, examine the horrors of slavery and expose the roots of the violence that persists in the Cincinnati-area community of blacks in Beloved. The community's many acts of violence toward Sethe and their rejection of her constitute repetitions of the violence which Sethe herself has visited on her daughter, an act of violence with roots in slavery.
However, the violence that is recounted in Sethe's detours is the violence of the slaveowners. And while one specific act of white violence toward blacks does not constitute the originary act of violence that begins the chain of reciprocal violence that plagues Beloved's community, it is slavery that has established the conditions that have led to Sethe's murder of her daughter— conditions in which it is dangerous to love too fiercely and with too much attachment. Within these conditions, Sethe takes control in the only form 224 possible to her— it is possible, then, to view her act as a willful act of power over her oppressors, and as an attempt to claim ownership of Beloved. However, to escape both the textual and emotional crises and to escape the chain of reciprocal violence, there must be a reenactment of that original violence and the target must be the oppressors themselves.
Because Sethe's, Paul D's, and the other characters' memories are "unspeakable," too painful to be allowed into consciousness, the narrative strategy in the novel resembles a slow circling, a recursive plot movement that integrates time past with time present, and which is built out of repetitions of the originary trauma that has initiated the plot. Thus, Sethe's secrets only slowly emerge into
Morrison's text; Sethe readily admits to Paul D that "I don't go inside" (46).^ Her personal strategy, and thus the strategy of the text, is to "circle" the subject rather than to go directly to the point; she detours and waylays the revelation, confrontation of which has not taken place in many years and the terror of which she has not faced fully:
"Circling, circling, now she was gnawing something else instead of getting to the point" (162) .
In fact, the violence of slavery and within African-
American communities has been repressed in American history and in Morrison's works prior to Beloved. Thus, what emerges in this work is a communal, racial consciousness, the revelation of secrets belonging at once to this text, to
Sethe, to the community, and to African-Americans. On one 225 level. Be.loved's psychoanalytic narrative strategy aligns well with an Afrocentric narrative pattern; Dorothea Mbalia reflects that "from the traditional African perspective, time is cyclic, not linear as in Western culture. The past, present, and future merge into one continuum, allowing
African people to move forward and backward in time" (101) . In many instances, Sethe tells stories that detour the forward-moving plot to share information that in her mind helps to create the emotional context of the events she is about to describe, material that for her is relevant to and helps to explain her actions and her motivations. Her references to the "more than a yard" of calico she had left behind in Kentucky and out of which she had meant to "make a shift for [her] girl" describe her state of mind, the
"selfish pleasure" she felt once she had escaped schoolteacher and her other slave masters. That selfishness,
Sethe remarks, extended to her children and made her love them more than she had as a slave. In fact, freedom for
Sethe had meant above many other things the freedom to love
"wide," to not have to "love small" as she had had to love as a slave in order to protect herself (162) .
But Sethe's ability to develop the context for her story is far greater than her ability to resist the impulse to repress the incident that had put her face in the newspaper.
Sethe is aware that "the circle she was making around the room, him, the subject, would remain one" (163). Even when she tries to tell the story for herself, Sethe detours, stops once she arrives in the shed where she killed Beloved, and can go no further; 226
She just flew. Collected every bit of life she had made, all the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful, and carried, pushed, dragged them through the veil, out, away, over there where no one could hurt them. . . . Sethe paused in her circle again and looked out the window. She remembered when the yard had a fence with a gate that somebody was always latching and unlatching in the time when 124 was busy as a way station. (163)
Like Sethe, all the characters in Beloved and, indeed,
the text itself, attempt to work their way through painful
memories in an attempt to move forward. Moreover, characters
seek to return to their origins, and to reexperience
previously repressed memories of the past as a means of understanding their present.Memories of repressed events emerge in a variety of ways, through stories related by
specific characters within a particular performance context— e.g., Sethe's example above— and also as memories detached
from any particular storytelling context. Earlier stories of
the past that found their way into the novel were earmarked as stories, such as the story of Denver's birth that Sethe tells and Denver retells and Paul D's accounts of life at
Sweet Home or his life in a prison camp in Alfred, Georgia.
For example, prior to one of Paul D's long reminiscences, the narrator tells us that Paul D is thinking back, consciously
remembering his, Sethe's, and the other slaves at Sweet
Home's attempted escape:
Now he wondered what all went wrong, and starting with the Plan, everything had. It was a good plan, too. Worked out in every detail with every possibility of error eliminated. Sixo, hitching up the horses, is speaking English again and tells Halle what his Thirty- Mile woman told him. That seven Negroes on her place were joining two others going north. (221-22) 227
By contrast, many of Sethe's stories are not incorporated as past, but are contemporaneous with the present; in essence, they are unconscious repetitions of the past in the present. It is as if the surface of the text were a consciousness into which memories previously repressed emerge, the product of the text's compulsion to repeat. As the text progresses, more and more often stories of the past emerge in this way, heightening the textual crisis. For example, once Sethe identifies Beloved as her daughter, she begins to allow memories, memories she has desperately tried to suppress, to enter her consciousness. Oddly, Sethe believes that Beloved is aware of these memories, that "Thank
God [she] doesn't have to remember or say a thing because
[Beloved knows] it. All" (191). Her memories then erupt into the text without being identified as memories and outside of any specific storytelling context: "then me and your brothers come up from the second patch. The first was one close to the house where quick things grew: beans, onions, sweet peas. The other one was further down for long lasting things, potatoes, pumpkin, okra, pork salad" (191-
92). Eventually the textual crisis reaches a point at which the identity of the narrators is impossible to determine.
Andrew Levy has also noted that the pace of surfacing memories quickens as the novel progresses, that the narrative in the latter half of the novel is dominated by storytelling, by using narrative to explain, justify, and abdicate (119) .
Morrison frequently shifts point of view, sometimes relying 228 on the third-person narration that dominates the text, but at times slipping into a first-person narration. At times, it is unclear who is narrating or whose consciousness is being rendered in the text.^^ Any one of the characters might be relating a particular memory, and we come to sense that these memories are shared, that the history they refer to is a communal one, important for and belonging to all of the characters. They speak to the history of a people and as such can be said to belong to no one narrator in particular.
In one example of shifting narrative voice, Denver begins to tell Beloved the story of her own birth, a story that is repeated in fragments and through fits and starts several times throughout the novel. Initially, the narrative renders Denver's consciousness in the third person: "Denver was seeing it now and feeling it— through Beloved. Feeling how it must have felt to her mother. Seeing how it must have looked" (78). However, signaled by two skipped lines in the text, the narrative lapses into a third-person narration that speaks through a shared consciousness, both Denver's and
Sethe's— "In an effort so great it made her sick to her stomach, Sethe turned onto her right side. Amy unfastened the back of her dress and said, 'Come here, Jesus' when she saw. Sethe guessed it must be bad because after that call to
Jesus Amy didn't speak for a while" (79). The chapter ends without returning to the forward-moving plot or the storytelling context. The story of Denver's birth is continued in the next chapter in passages that are clearly
Sethe's memories, Sethe's consciousness. The continuation of 229 the story is marked only by the narrator's comments that
"however many times Baby denied it, Sethe knew that the grief at 124 started when she jumped down off the wagon, her newborn tied to her chest in the underwear of a whitegirl looking for Boston" (90). By fusing past and present, and by fusing the consciousnesses of the characters, Morrison emphasizes the importance of the former slaves' shared past and provides an emotional and historical context for the lives of her central characters and the community in the present.
Beloved's arrival heightens the text's temporal crisis. Her presence constitutes a physical return of the repressed and the existence of time past within time present. Even though her body appears to be that of "a young woman, about nineteen or twenty, and slender" and even though she "moved like a heavier one or older one" (55-56), Beloved is an infant, Sethe's murdered daughter, returned to haunt her.
Born out of the water, with no lines on her hands and no knowledge of her people, she is the physical manifestation of the spirit that had haunted 124 ever since Sethe took her daughter's life eighteen years before. Her skin is
"flawless, except for three vertical scratches on her forehead" and "the little curved shadow of a smile in the kootchy-kootchy-coo place under her chin" (240). Beloved herself seems to have no personal memories; she didn't "have much of an idea of what she was doing in that part of the country or where she had been. They believed the fever had caused her memory to fail" (55). On the other hand. Beloved seems to possess definite notions of Sethe's past life. 230 memory traces for which Sethe cannot account. The glimpses
Morrison provides into Beloved's psyche reveal that she is the living memory of a race of oppressed and enslaved people, a walking and breathing testament to Sethe's, her mother's, and her mother's mother's memories of slavery and humiliation. In fact. Beloved is the manifestation of the past's demands on the present, its desire to usurp the present and to violate the rights of Sethe and Denver and the entire community to move forward and to live in the present.
Beloved desires a personal attachment to Sethe and desperately seeks recognition in this world. The only thing more powerful than this woman-child's desire for sweets is her hunger for Sethe's stories: "[telling Beloved stories] became a way to feed her. . . . Sethe learned the profound satisfaction Beloved got from storytelling" (58). Stories for Beloved are life-sustaining, creating for her a personal history and an identity. Moreover, they help to reestablish the link between mother and daughter that in Beloved's eyes was severed by Sethe. The stories of the diamonds, a pair of crystal earrings presented to Sethe by her owner's wife on the day of her marriage, is related in response to Beloved's request :
"Where your diamonds?" Beloved searched Sethe's face. "Diamonds? What would I be doing with diamonds?" "On your ears." "Wish I did. I had some crystal once. A present from a lady I worked for." "Tell me," Beloved said, smiling a wide happy smile. "Tell me your diamonds." (58) 231
Stories like the stories of the "diamonds" help Beloved to
reconstruct and reaffirm her connection with Sethe and to keep Sethe fixed self-destructively on the past, rather than working through the past to incorporate it as past in the present. In addition, in response to Beloved's prompts,
Sethe is able to reconstruct her own identity through stories
and to work through painful memories of the past. However,
the stories that Sethe tells to satisfy Beloved's craving,
require Sethe to dig deep into a past that she had worked hard to repress : Beloved's yearning to hear stories "amazed
Sethe . . . because every mention of her past life hurt" (58) .
The claim that Beloved has staked at 124 translates into a violent entrapment in the past. Beloved has returned to seek justification from her mother for her death, a justification that Sethe cannot deliver, for the responsibility for Beloved's death belongs to the system of
Slavery: "Denver thought she understood the connection between her mother and Beloved; Sethe was trying to make up for the handsaw; Beloved was making her pay for it. But there would never be an end to that" (251) .
Even while Beloved and Sethe are entrenched in their struggle, Denver uses stories and storytelling to claim
Beloved in an effort to end her loneliness and further strengthen the bonds between herself and her mother— in short, to forge an identity for herself. Denver finds in
Beloved an ally who can help her to reclaim her mother from her interest in Paul D who wants to plan and build a future with Sethe. Beloved, however, has her attention fixed on 232
Sethe, so Denver uses stories of Sethe and her own birth to keep Beloved entertained and to solidify a bond between them.
Again and again. Beloved asks for the story: "Tell me,"
Beloved said. "Tell me how Sethe made you in the boat" (7 6).
Beloved questions Denver unrelentingly about the details,
"Who is that?" and "What's velvet?" (76). Denver also discovers that embellishing the stories only brings Beloved closer, keeps her attention longer: "and the more fine points she made, the more detail she provided, the more Beloved liked it. So she anticipated the questions by giving blood to the scraps her mother and grandmother had told her—and a heartbeat" (78). In response to Beloved's "alert and hungry face," Denver gives her stories "more life than life had"
(120) .
Furthermore, collapse of narrative difference is evident when Denver shares stories with Beloved. In one instance,
Denver's monologue becomes a "duet as the two of them lay down together, Denver nursing Beloved's interest like a lover whose pleasure was to overfeed the loved" (78) . As Denver proceeds with the story, Morrison slips out of Denver's voice and into the voice of a limited omniscient narrator, a slip that suggests a conflation of voices belonging to Denver,
Beloved, Sethe, Baby Suggs, Paul D, and indeed a whole people. This blending of narrative voices emphasizes
Morrison's point that history is shared within the community and that only through solidarity can the community hope to survive that history and its insidious effects in the present. 233
Contributing to the textual crisis and to the sense that the memories emerging through these characters belong to a shared ancestral past, the black peoples' past of oppression and degradation in America, Morrison presents monologues from
Sethe and Denver in which both claim Beloved as their own.
And, indeed. Beloved does belong to each of them, for she is the living emblem of their suffering, their loneliness, their exile from the community. She is the living testament to their shared history, to their ancestral past; she is the physical embodiment of the African-American people's oppression and the hatred and strife that oppression breeds within their community, estranging one member from another, forcing them to do unspeakable things in the name of protecting each other from the unbearable pain of slavery.
Reaching centuries into their collective past. Beloved's monologue describes the passage from Africa, the overcrowding on slaveships, where the dead are left to rot among the living, who subsist on the worst food, and with insufficient water and little air to breath:
All of it is now it is always now there will never be a time when I am not crouching and watching others who are crouching . . . the man on my face is dead . . . the men without skin bring us their morning water to drink we have none at night I cannot see the dead man on my face. (210; Morrison's spaces, ellipses)
Just as in The Bluest Eye, when Morrison's narrative signaled narrative and communal collapse through the loss of punctuation, Morrison presents this poetic passage that lacks punctuation to add emphasis to the crisis of narrative difference. Because Beloved's monologue erupts into the 234 forward-moving plot and is rendered in a stream-of- consciousness narrative style, it also emphasizes the persistence of those memories, their unwillingness to die or be repressed. The use of stream-of-consciousness in
Beloved's monologue suggests the eruption of memory into consciousness. Through her narrative strategy, Morrison emphasizes the need for the characters to claim their past and to see that past as a shared, communal experience. Sethe believes her daughter has returned to be with her and that she must justify her actions to her, but most of all her monologue lays claim to Beloved:
BELOVED, she my daughter. She mine. See. She come back to me of her own free will and I don't have to explain a thing. I didn't have time to explain before because it had to be done quick. Quick. She had to be safe and I put her where she would b e . But my love v/as tough and she back now. (200-01)
Denver is equally possessive of Beloved: "Love her. I do.
She played with me and always came to be with me whenever I needed her. She's mine. Beloved. She's mine" (209).
Finally, Sethe, Beloved, and Denver's chorus arises to give voice to their mutual claims on each other and to emphasize the shared nature of their experience as oppressed African-
American women: "you are mine," the voices say (215) . Karla
Holloway notices that Morrison employs a strategy of repeating passages, phrases, and words to further blend the consciousnesses of the characters. Moreover, she argues that in their individual monologues, the characters compete for 235
"the reader's attention, the text and the history itself"
(520) .
Morrison's narrative strategy reflects the novel's
concern with constructing identity through narratives.
However, it is also about the claims of the past on the
living and about her characters' fight to reconcile themselves with their personal and ancestral pasts. In the community's unified response to the past's claims on the
living, Morrison offers the solution that has remained unspoken in her previous novels: to overcome the past, to escape the cycles of violence set up within their own communities by slavery, communities must rely on its unity and strength as communities.
Beloved, as the embodiment of an ancestral past, demands that Sethe, Denver, and the entire community forego their lives in the present to embrace her. However, embracing
Beloved means remaining locked in a self-destructive cycle of reciprocal violence. When the women of the community learn that "Sethe's dead daughter, the one whose throat she cut, had come back to fix her" and that Sethe was "worn down . . . and generally bedeviled. That this daughter beat her, tied her to the bed and pulled out her hair," they become outraged and band together to exorcise this devil from 124 (256).
Ella, for example, feels "something very personal in her fury" about Beloved camping out in Sethe's house, and believes that "the past something to leave behind. And if it didn't stay behind, well, you might have to stomp it out"
(2 5 6 ) . Dorothea Mbalia describes Beloved as the 236
"personification of individual needs and desires" (90). She argues that Paul D's presence "sets in motion the necessary purgative confrontation between Sethe, Beloved, and the
Cincinnati African community" (91). Thus the struggle in the novel becomes the community's struggle for coherence and solidarity in the face of individual need. "In Beloved," Mbalia says, "life is hell, but togetherness, shared experience, and brotherly/sisterly love help the characters to survive, if not to forge better lives for themselves"
(91) . And it is finally the community of women that defeats
Beloved and tears Sethe from the arms of this greedy ghost.
Their reversion to a pre-verbal state reveals Morrison's interest in returning the community to its origins. Thirty women from Cincinnati converge on the house at 124 Bluestone, not sure of what they are going to do when they get there, but willing to bind together in their fight against what they consider an "invasion" of evil (257). "When they caught up with each other, all thirty, and arrived at 124, the first thing they saw was not Denver sitting on the steps, but themselves. Younger, stronger, even as little girls lying in the grass asleep. . . . [they saw themselves] playing in baby
Suggs' yard, not feeling the envy that surfaced the next day"
(258). Their chorus of "Hear me. Hear me. Do it. Maker, do it. Yes" rises up to battle the jungle of voices surrounding
124. But their chorus suddenly transforms from language,
"[takes] a step back to the beginning . . . [where] there were no words. In the beginning there was the sound, and they all knew what that sound sounded like" (258-59). The 237
women's voices "searched for the right combination, the key,
the code, the sound that broke the back of words. Building voice upon voice until they found it, and when they did it was a wave of sound wide enough to sound deep water and knock the pods off chestnut trees" (261)
The reenactment of the original trauma by both Sethe and the community, who relive and reproduce the anxiety repressed at the time, resolves both the crisis of difference within the community and 124 and the narrative crisis, restoring the novel to time present and the community and 124 to a state of enlivening distinction. Peter Brooks writes that "the repetition of traumatic experiences in the dreams of the neurotics can be seen to have the function of seeking retrospectively to master the flood of stimuli, to perform a mastery or binding of mobile energy through developing that anxiety which earlier was lacking--a lack which permitted the breach and thus caused the traumatic neurosis" (100) . Thus when Morrison stages the reenactment of the slavecatchers' invasion of Sethe's yard, she allows for a reproduction of anxiety and an escape from textual neurosis.
Beloved departs from Morrison's other novels by offering that specific reenactment that will provide escape for the community from violence and will release the novel from plottedness. The reenactment takes place in the next-to-final scene in the novel. Eighteen years earlier, when a white man had ridden into her yard to take her and her children back into slavery, Sethe had struck out at one of her own, exerting herself in the only way possible and striving in 238
some way to take control of a situation in which she would
have been powerless otherwise. The result of her act, however, was to instigate a chain of reciprocal violence that
entangled the community and Sethe herself in the past, and to
initiate a plot which is equally bound to the past.
In the closing scene, Sethe, believing a white man
approaching in a wagon to be a slavecatcher returned to take
her "best thing" away from her again, strikes out at the
white oppressor. Although the target of her vengeance is
arguably a better man than the schoolteacher and many other
whites, for that matter, he is, nonetheless, white,
demonstrating Morrison's point that any white target is more
appropriate than one from within the black community. This
reenactment of her original trauma allows Sethe to escape
from the pattern of repetition and to reclaim her life from
Beloved, who instantly and miraculously vanishes.It is
clear that the women of the community stop Sethe's attack,
aware of how misguided it is. Nonetheless, in Sethe's brain
Mr. Bodwins' ride up to her gate repeats schoolteacher's
invasion and produces in her the previously repressed
anxiety. Sethe's attack on Mr. Bodwin is more important for
what it symbolizes than for what actually occurs. In fact, by attacking her white oppressors, Sethe forever names the root cause of contention within the community. This ritual
reexperiencing of trauma, witnessed by the entire community,
indeed, sanctioned by the community, constitutes the violence to end all violence, the ritual sacrifice that can restore harmony and distinction within the community and the 239
narrative. From this point the novel can continue in the
present, pushing toward an imagined future.
Nonetheless, the reenactment of the original trauma does
not release the novel from plottedness altogether, though it
does set the stage for reconciliation and an imagined future.
The final chapter of Beloved recounts Paul D's return to 124
where his "memory" of Beloved "turns . . . into dustmotes floating in light" (264). Still, the text of this chapter is
dominated by a return of repressed memories for Paul D.
However, this return is a conscious working through of painful memories of the past; his rememory functions to exorcise his own ghosts. And, significantly, Paul D's detour brings him back to the present and to 124 with this comment
from the narrator: "Now his coming is the reverse of his going" (270). Paul D and the text itself literally backtrack their way through the past to the present, detouring through the past to arrive at the present relieved of the burden of the past and plottedness.
Paul D's final chapter reminds us that the novel cannot escape from plottedness or repetition until the individual character has worked through painful, repressed memories of the past. In part, we would expect the novel to be released from plot with the reenactment of the schoolteacher's invasion of Sethe's yard, and the scene does enable us to return to the middles of Morrison's text to infuse those repetitions of violence with meaning, to understand them in the context of that end. However, Paul D's chapter impresses on us the need for the individual to work through the 240 personal past in order the move forward. Paul D returns to
124 and to Sethe whole and wholly conscious of the pain he harbors from the past, but he has clearly moved beyond this pain, enabling him to forgive Sethe— he has finally unloaded the "tobacco tin" of his heart in which he had buried his memories for so long. Finally, Morrison's tour de force cannot and does not end with Paul D. Instead, the narrator, speaking in a voice that signals the close of plot and that speaks from outside of plot, entreats us not to pass this story on; "it was not a story to pass on" (274). The use of this voice clearly signals the end of plot; however, it as powerfully compels us to return to the story, to dwell on it, even while it attempts to persuade us to forget, as the commentary suggests the townsfolk "forgot [Beloved] . . . Like an unpleasant dream during a troubling sleep" (275). This narrator's pleas for readers to forget the story they have just read forces them to reassess its meaning. I do not believe that this would be the case if in the narrator's eyes the story is simply too painful to remember. Clearly it has and will be remembered, and not only will it be remembered, but it will take up residence in the consciousness of the reader, as opposed to the unconscious of the novel's characters.
Perhaps, when Morrison's narrator demands that Beloved's story is "not a story to pass on, " she refers to the story of the violence within the community, and the community's tendency to displace their anger on members of their own communities. Perhaps what is not to be passed on is this self-destructive violence. 241
Beloved serves as an end to Morrison's quest to resolve the problem of violence that has preoccupied her in four previous novels. Indeed, this "ending" plunges us back into the middles of her work, into her earlier novels, enabling us to infer the meaning that has escaped us. In a sense.
Beloved returns Morrison to her own novelistic origins even as it returns the African-American population to its ancestral past. Marilyn Mobley points out that "Morrison does not lament the past but seeks a means of reclaiming what is good and useful to empower her people to survive difficult circumstances in the present" (Folk Roots 23). She argues that Morrison wants to "celebrate the past" and "give continuity with the present" through her fiction (Folk Roots
12 ) .
Thus, coming to terms with that past gives shape to
Morrison's novel and grants freedom to a people for whom achieving true freedom nonetheless remains a struggle.
Morrison's novel gives testimony to the pain that all of the slave women and their descendants have suffered and will suffer. According to Wilfred Samuels and Clenora Hudson-
Weems, Morrison has decided that she must "'rip the veil' behind which the slave narrator was forced to hide" (97).
Morrison, as Hudson-Weems and Samuels point out, must also reconstruct the narrative of the slave woman, whose story is seldom recorded and then not fully. She provides "the avenue for a resurrected female slave narrator's voice" (97-98).
The story that Toni Morrison's Beloved tells is, in her narrator's words, "not a story to pass on." Molly Abel
Travis writes in "Speaking from the Silence of the Slave 242
Narrative: Beloved and Afra-American History," that Morrison reminds us that we must "remember the wholeness of our personal histories and cultural histories; even those parts we would most like to forget" (18). Indeed, Morrison's
Beloved bears witness to "an unwritten Afra-American history" (Travis 18). Travis also notes that "the process of disremembering and reremembering . . . enabled Blacks to live through the unbearableness of being" (1). However, it is clear that Morrison has complicated the process of memory even as she inscribes this unwritten history and that her novel as emphatically reminds us that history, both personal and cultural, has the power to entrap and to enslave. 243
NOTES
^ Deborah Sitter suggests in "The Making of a Man: Dialogic Meaning in Beloved " that the novel "involves the way internalization of oppressor's values can distort all intimate human relationships and even subvert the self" (18). I would argue that, at least in part, Morrison's project has consistently been to demonstrate the results of abandoning the values of one's own culture in favor of the values of the oppressors. Sitter asserts, moreover, that human emotions are twisted and perverted as a result of slavery's view of individuals as property and assessing their value in terms of "resale value" (18).
“ Barbara Dixson argues in "Yes/And: Toni Morrison's Beloved" that "an essential link in Sethe's tragic chain is the community's resentment at the Suggs family excess the day of the barbecue, a resentment that leads to failure to warn Sethe of the slave catchers' approach" (3).
^ Writing in Toni Morrison's Developing Class Consciousness, Dorothea Mbalia argues, as I have, that each of Morrison's novels defines or redefines the problem of oppression, moving closer and closer to a solution, a way to cope and move beyond oppression (88). Moreover, Mbalia identifies "the suicidal or homicidal nature of those Africans who divorce themselves from other Africans" as a recurrent theme in Morrison's fiction (88). "Isolation," Mbalia continues, "literally tears apart the family— nuclear, the extended, and the nation" (90).
^ Trudier Harris notes in Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison that "by denouncing her calling. Baby Suggs rejects the power of folk imagination, which has clearly served a constructive purpose for her and the entire community along Bluestone Road" (175) . Moreover, Harris notes that Baby Suggs' rejection of this role is a "victimization" (175).
^ Dorothea Mbalia shows how Denver's and Sethe's isolation is "genocidal for the race," and "serve[s] to further divide the African community and, as a consequence, leave it vulnerable to the oppression and exploitation of the slave society" (90). Also, in "Maternal Bonds as Devourers of Women's Individuation in Toni Morrison's Beloved," Stephanie Demetrakopoulos notes that "Sethe further fixes on the past by never mingling with the Black community, by protecting the only child who stays with her, her daughter Denver, from the 244
past without seeming to ever think of the girl's future or need for community" (54).
^ Karla Holloway states in "Beloved: A Spiritual" that "Beloved held not only her own history, but those of 'sixty million and more'" (523). Holloway writes that "Beloved is not only Sethe's dead daughter returned, but the return of all the faces, all the drowned, but remembered, faces of mothers and their children who have lost their being because of the force of EuroAmerican slave-history" (522). She notes that "the relatively limited idea of time as being either in the past, the present, or the future is inadequate for a text like Beloved" (521) . Holloway argues that it is Beloved who "denied [Denver and Sethe] their space in a secure and memory-less present" (520). "Living itself," Holloway writes, "is suspended in this story because of the simultaneous presence of the past" (521). Finally, Holloway suggests that "Sethe's, Denver's, and Beloved's voices blend and merge as text and lose the distinction of discourse as they narrate," in order to show that time and space are collapsed, irrelevant in their shared monologue (520) .
Marilyn Sanders Mobley writes in "A Different Remembering: Memory, History, and Meaning in Toni Morrison's Beloved, Toni Morrison ed . Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1990) that "while the slave narrative characteristically moves in a chronological, linear narrative fashion. Beloved meanders through time, sometimes circling back, other times moving vertically, spirally out of time and down into space. Indeed, Morrison's text challenges the Western notion of linear time that informs American history and the slave narratives" (192). In addition, Holloway notes that "Beloved becomes a text collected with the textures of living and dying rather than with a linear movement of events" (222) . "Pecola's story in The Bluest Eye," according to Catherine Rainwater, "is conveyed through strategies of encirclement, as if drawing smaller and smaller rings around a center could somehow force 'truth' to appear there" (101) . Rainwater asserts that this circular pattern eventually breaks down and the "harvest" of truth that is sought does not occur ("Worthy Messengers" 101). In contrast, there is a "harvest of truth" in Beloved, where Morrison posits a way out of the dilemma of violence within the community.
^ Writing in "'Ripping the Veil': Meaning through Rememory in Beloved," Toni Morrison, Wilfred D.Samuels and Clenora Hudson-Weems claim that we find in Sethe's behavior yet another example of the slave's resistance to slavery; for though the North American annals of slavery record, relatively speaking, offer few collective and even revolutionary acts of resistance, more were, as Deborah White 245 points out, "generally individualistic, and aimed at maintaining what the slave master and overseer had in the course of their relationships, perceived as an acceptable level of work, shelter, force, punishment, and free time . . . the best most could hope for was survival with a modicum of dignity" (107). Again, Hudson-Weems and Samuels note that Sethe's inability to recall the painful experiences in her past, are "due in part to her successful act of 'disremembering,' of consciously obliterating her painful past. Most painful had been the denial and then severance of any semblance of a meaningful relationship with her mother, who had been branded and later hanged because of her daily resistance to slavery" (99). Of course, that memory is compounded by the violence and loss she suffers at the hands of schoolteacher, Mr. Garner's brother who comes to oversee the plantation after his brother's death. Finally, Morrison refers to the "complicated psychic power one had to exercise to resist devastation" (qtd. in Mobley, "A Different Remembering" 197).
^ Other critics point out, as I have in earlier chapters, that Morrison's texts keep secrets, using the tension of withheld information to drive the plot which is thus charged by the reader's desire for meaning. Mobley observes that Beloved is a text that depends heavily on secrets and secrecy and that "the text of Beloved moves through a series of narrative starts and stops that are complicated by Sethe's desire to forget or 'disremember' the past" ("A Different Remembering" 194).
Catherine Rainwater writes that "it is through searching a character's origins that the narrator attempts to know the characters and understand them" (102) . "Her narrators also constantly backtrack in pursuit of elusive points of origin, even as they pursue forward, linear development" (106). Rainwater further observes that "one variety of narrative regression involves attempts to account for the present moment in a character's life by sifting backward through the lives and moments of contingent characters" (106). Finally, Rainwater asserts that the search for origins must always be frustrated because "the thread of origins disappears in the backward expanse of generations" (107) .
Catherine Rainwater suggests that "Morrison sometimes employs a Jamesian technique: she temporarily merges the narrator's point of view with that of a character, but later undercuts or problematizes this point of view by presenting its alternatives. Such a strategy finally reiterates her thematic message that there is no reliable ground or 'mooring' from which to know or tell the 'true' version of any story" (97). More importantly, characters are sometimes 246 exposed to variants that "tease them into acts of interpretation" (97).
According to Andrew Levy, "Beloved is not only about individuals who attempt to make a usable present from an almost unusable past [;] it is also a novel where the past literally returns in corporeal form both to salvage and undo that limited project. But it is also, most significantly, a novel where the past is driven back, however, ambivalently, so that scars may be healed or forgotten" (119) .
Even the trip by Mr. Bodwin, a white man who had helped Baby Suggs and rented the house at Bluestone to her, is a return to his origins: "he had promised his sister a detour to pick up [Denver]. He didn't have to think about the way— he was headed for the house he was born in. Perhaps it was his destination that turned his thoughts to time— how it dripped and ran" (259) . His memories are connected with slavery and the ridicule he suffered as a "bleached nigger" abolitionist (260). The closer he moves toward 124, the deeper he digs in his memory for things he buried there as a child: "the box of tin soldiers. . . . the watch chain with no watch" (260). Eventually his thoughts turn to the "runaway slavewoman . . . [who] got herself into a world of trouble" (260). Again, even for Bodwin, the process of rememory is one of returning to origins and working through memory to the present.
Andrew Levy agrees that "Beloved's departure from the text represents an exit from a struggle between memory and future that would have resulted in the destruction of both: Sethe's past, Sethe's future" (119) .
Dorothea Mbalia suggests that "not until the cause of separation is clarified, is out in the open, struggled with and struggled against, can African people come together again. Beloved must materialize into a visible, tangible entity of which the community is aware, instead of an amorphous apparition, an oppression of which the community is unconscious" (91). As Mbalia points out, the community must come together to eradicate the past, to struggle against the root of the violence that has subjugated them and set up animosity within their group. Moreover, in Catherine Rainwater's narrative analysis of Morrison's novels, she points out that even while Morrison employs a third-person narrator and gives speeches to Sethe and Denver, none can finally reach the truth of Beloved's existence (100) . In fact, the truth of Beloved's existence can only be relived; her death must be relived before her identity and origins can be verified. CHAPTER VI
Conclusion
Pain. I seem to have an affection, a kind of sweettooth for it. . . . What, I wonder, would I be without a few brilliant spots of blood to ponder? Without aching words that set, then miss, the mark? (the narrator. Jazz 219)
Toni Morrison's fiction does not attempt to rewrite history but to reclaim a history that has never been written.
Her stories, her lives, her worlds embrace the unwritten history of an entire people. And that history breathes life into the faces and voices of her fiction. Yet Morrison's novels do not simply look back into the past. Instead, they seek the life of the past to bring a new spirit to the
African-American present and future--they reinstill the values and beliefs of the past in the present. Her fiction testifies to her drive to locate in the past, the spirit of community that will reunite her people and insure their survival and prosperity.^
As fiction that attempts to retrieve from the past a value system that Morrison feels is lost among today's
African-American populations, Morrison's work is deeply rooted in community. She has identified the central focus in her fiction as the "village":
247 248
I write what I have recently begun to call village literature, fiction that is really for the village, for the tribe. Peasant literature for my people, which is necessary and legitimate but which also allows me to get in touch with all sorts of people, (qtd. in Mobley 7)
Thus, characters like Pilate Dead who embody that Southern rural heritage, or Sula, who live for the affirmation of difference and independence, always occupy places of prominence in Morrison's fiction. And communities like
Medallion, Lorain, or the Cincinnati community surrounding
124 Bluestone Road, and their value and belief systems, are themselves characters of vital importance in Morrison's works.
Morrison's focus on the "village" concentrates on reawakening a sense of community among African-Americans, a sense of solidarity that is resilient in the face of the onslaught of the dominant class's often destructive value systems. Driven by greed, unattainable ideals of beauty, and the repression of the individual, the value system of the dominant class in Morrison's works does not embrace the community or strength through identifying with a Southern,
African-American rural heritage based on community values. Above all, in Morrison's fiction the greatest threat from the dominant culture is its drive to eliminate the differences that distinguish African-Americans from those in the majority.
Thus, Morrison attempts to reaffirm African and African-
American identity through her work. Speaking on the need to preserve a cultural identity, Morrison asserts that
people do not know what they lose when they make away with the reserve, the separateness, the sanctity of the 249
front yard of their grandmothers. It is like . . . [taking] . . . away the fence which, slight as it may be, is a fortification around your home. More things than one may come in without being asked; we Americans had better build more fences than take away from our lives, (qtd. in Mobley 5)
The destruction of Morrison's communities— Medallion and the
Bottom, for instance— invariably results from alienation from
a cultural heritage. The key to the salvation of the
community and cultural preservation is to renew the links
with the most positive elements of traditional African- American culture.
The persistent drive to return to the past to reclaim traditions as well as the past's insistence that it will not be suppressed, is a feature of Morrison's fiction that is
revealed through a study of the development of her entire
canon. Beginning with The Bluest Eye, it is clear that
Morrison's characters will struggle to escape their past,
usually unsuccessfully. Study of the subsequent novels
reveals that Morrison's characters will not move forward
unless they come to terms with both their personal and ancestral past, nor will they escape the violence that
refusal to embrace those lost traditional values seems to
inaugurate. For example, in The Bluest Eye Polly Breedlove's attempts to distance herself from a painful past and from her
African-American identity contribute to her daughter's decline into madness. Repetitions of the past also plague her husband, Cholly Breedlove. He rapes their daughter to help assuage the loneliness he feels from having been abandoned as a child. Similarly, in Song of Solomon, having 250 adopted the values of the white middle-class, Macon Dead subjugates his own people as an unfeeling, tyrannical landlord. Macon's sister, Pilate Dead, is murdered by Guitar whose revolutionary goals ironically align him with the white ruling class and entrap him in cycles of violence. Finally, in Beloved, slavery erodes the community values that had once helped to preserve and unite the people. Traditional values are so perverted by slavery that Sethe is driven to murder her own daughter to keep her from slavery's horrors. Until Sethe comes to grips with the past, her present is ruled by violence.
More importantly, however, a study of Morrison's novels shows that Morrison herself delves deeper and deeper into
African-American history to understand the dilemma her fiction describes. The Bluest Eye returns to the Depression to explore oppression's effects on the lives of her African-
American characters. Sula works its way from the aftermath of World War I to the Depression to the mid-60s to chronicle the ways an African-American community struggles to stay united within an oppressive social structure. Finally,
Morrison begins to pose solutions to the problems of violence and preserving cultural identity when, in Beloved, she returns to the most devastating African-American trauma— slavery. Morrison's work as a whole is shaped by a persistent need to narrate and thus escape an ever-more distant past.
Overall, her characters, her individual novels, and her work as a whole are driven by a need to understand and move beyond the past. In Jazz (1992), Morrison still interrogates the dilemma of violence in African-American communities and the 251 pressures that the violence of oppression place on those communities. Thus, as a body of work, Morrison's novels drive deeper and deeper into the past, yet resist closure.
As I have shown, throughout her fiction Morrison strives to build the fences to fortify African-American front yards against the dissolution of cultural identity through storytelling. Her characters and her narrative strategy show that the African-American heritage will not be suppressed, but will drive its way to the surface of consciousness, demanding its place in the present. Moreover, she relies on a centuries-old oral tradition in African-American literature and culture to reinvest the African-American heritage with the value it deserves.^
Yet Morrison's fiction goes beyond simply recalling or appealing to an oral tradition. Instead, the progression of her work shows that she actually pushes the limits of that tradition, following in the footsteps of African griots, but extending that path beyond modern African-American writers like James Baldwin or Richard Wright to the post-modern with novels like Beloved and Sula.^ Sula's gaps, its lack of concern with traditional narrative continuity, and its recursive narrative strategy subvert conventional literary traditions. In addition, Sula attempts over and over to find closure, yet remains open even after the narrative has ended.
And, Morrison's Beloved incorporates traditional storytelling even while it employs a synchronous,non-linear view of time that is at once postmodern, Afrocentric, and psychoanalytic. 252
Indeed, Beloved comes into being only through a subversion of traditional notions of the novel. For example, Beloved integrates lyrical passages that more closely resemble poetry. More importantly. Beloved subverts traditional notions of narrative voice by blending, shifting, and overlapping the identities of her narrators. Even though Morrison subverts traditional narrative forms, this study is devoted to understanding her work in relation to Peter Brooks' analysis of traditional narratives.
Susan Winnet criticizes Peter Brooks' theory of narrative by revealing its gender bias and claiming that it provides a narrative model based almost solely on a male-centered view of human sexuality in which the pleasure of the reader is invariably end-determined. While Winnett's own text aims at understanding the limitations of Brooks' narrative model and seeks to incorporate a more female-centered, orgasmic view of reading and the pleasure of reading, she reveals a somewhat conventional view of sexuality. Nonetheless, she argues convincingly that Brooks has overlooked aspects of female sexuality in his formulation of a narrative model that places so much emphasis on endings and a final discharge. Thus,
Winnett attempts to pose "an alternative" but not "the alternative" to Brooks' model, citing many other possibilities for "narrative outside a psychoanalytic paradigm that sees [narrative as a dramatization] of sexual drives" (508).
Understandably, feminist critics may be uncomfortable when a critical study of a female writer "invokes the
Freudian apparatus" and a "narrative model that [in Winnett's 253 words] speaks to and of male experience" (Winnett 511).
Indeed, a novel like Sula, which, as I have suggested, resists closure, can hardly be said to be totalized through any one central metaphor. It is, instead, undeterminable and not end-determined in any simple way. True, the dynamics of the relationship between Nel and Sula offer one metaphor through which to view the other events and relationships in the novel, but it hardly reduces those events to mere repetitions without their own intrinsic, meaning-making realms. Shadrack's plot is not independent of Nel and Sula's relationship, but it is not dependent on it either. His plot provides excellent examples of plot elements that mean entirely on their own, that have their own specific context, or that provide a context for understanding the novel from a different perspective.
Similarly, it would be unproductive to argue that
Beloved can be reduced to a single, totalizing metaphor. A novel like Beloved means on too many different levels. I have attempted to identify one or two strands of meaning in
Morrison's work, not to reduce all of her work to meaning on these levels. This would be too reductive and a tremendous disservice to one of America's finest and most complex writers.
Moreover, Brooks' theory of narrative allows that the desire of the reader is satisfied not simply by reaching the end, but by turning back into the text to reinfuse new meaning in the metonymic sequences that form plot. Brooks writes that 254
since ends have ceased to be simple . . . the end that narrative seeks, in its anticipation of retrospection, may disappoint and baffle. Yet this may make it the more necessary to construct meaning from that end, moving back to recover markings from the past, reconstructing the outposts of meaning along the way. (323)
The result of this turning back into the text is a recursive meaning-making process that endlessly circles back on itself. As Brooks suggests, within narrative, as viewed from a belief
in an "infinite series of times," an ending may be considered as "simply one contingency, a possible fabula produced by a truly infinite sjuzet" (319). Morrison's individual novels and her work as a whole reflect this process of endlessly reconstructing meanings based on an "infinite sjuzet." Thus, one reading of Song of Solomon will be revised by later readings. Similarly, my reading of Beloved revises my reading of earlier novels, just as my re-reading The Bluest
Eye will revise my reading(s) of Beloved. Most important, perhaps, by employing Brooks' model, this study encourages making meaning from Morrison's texts in relation to one another; it encourages the study of her work as a whole.
Reading Morrison's most recent novel. Jazz, within the context of her earlier novels reveals her continued interest in exploring violence and the uses of the past within
African-American communities. The novel chronicles the lives of Joe and Violet Trace, a couple from rural Virginia who move to "the City" where Joe eventually falls out of love with Violet and in love with eighteen-year old, Dorcas
Manfred. The novel takes a quintessentially Morrison-esque turn when a jealous Joe Trace tracks Dorcas down and shoots 255 her to death. Despite the violence at the heart of Jazz, the novel ends on a redemptive note, with Violet and Joe reconciled through the power of renewal that Dorcas' former friend, Felice, brings to the Traces.
Morrison's focus on the community shifts slightly in
Jazz to concentrate on "the City," Harlem of the 1920s. However, the City assumes its own personality in Jazz just as smaller communities have their own identity in her earlier novels. Morrison devotes long passages to describing the City ravaged by the new "dirty, get-on-down" jazz of the title (58). Her tale of 1920s Harlem is also interrupted by long passages describing the "citysky," returning to Joe and
Violet's story as a part of that Cityscape, and not necessarily a more important part (36). Their story cannot be divorced from the story of the City; nor can the City's part in their lives be ignored.
Not only does Joe and Violet's story take place in the
City but it also plays out against a backdrop of oppression and subjugation. Whites characters are on the periphery of
Jazz just as they have been in many earlier novels.
Nonetheless, Morrison depicts oppression and discrimination in the City, in part by describing the fears of Alice
Manfred, Dorcas' adoptive mother:
Fifth Avenue was for her the most fearful of all. That was where whitemen leaned out of motor cars with folded dollar bills peeping from their palms. It was where salesmen touched her and only her as though she were part of the goods they had condescended to sell her. (54) 256
Morrison also alludes to African-American protesters marching to denounce the "two hundred dead in East St. Louis" to help paint her portrait of the pervasive oppression of and violence toward African-Americans (57). Overall, clear signs of oppression, such as the sub-standard living conditions and economic disenfranchisement, create a setting so oppressive that its influence on characters' lives seems inevitable even though no direct causal relationship is apparent. Just as violence has free reign in Sula within the context of "the nigger joke," so violence flourishes within Morrison's
"City."
The litany of violent crimes against African-Americans continues unabated throughout the novel, adding definition to the backdrop for the violence of Violet's and Joe Trace's lives in Harlem. Violet's mother, for example, is taken to the breaking point in part because of the horrors of their oppression :
What was the thing I wonder, the one and final thing she had not been able to endure or repeat? . . . Perhaps word had reached her about the four-day hangings in Rocky Mount : the men on Tuesday, the women two days later. Or had it been the news of the young tenor in the choir mutilated and tied to a log, his grandmother refusing to give up his waste-filled trousers? (101)
Within this context of oppression, reciprocal violence is ever-present and the most distinctive feature of Joe and
Violet Trace's lives. Alice Manfred, whose husband had left her for another woman, "had never picked up a knife . .
.[but] she was starving for blood" (86). And the blood Alice is starving for is not her unfaithful husband's, but the "red liquid coursing through the other woman's veins" (85) . At 257 the center of the novel, Morrison sets up an unusual love triangle between Joe Trace, Violet Trace, and Joe's eighteen- year-old lover, Dorcas Manfred. Even though Violet fears that she must compete with a dead woman for her husband's love— "Can't rival the dead for love. Lose every time"—
Violet "wonders if she isn't falling in love with her too"
(15). Violet's desire for the dead lover is a mediated, mimetic desire that generates violence. Her response to her husband's infidelity is to first lash out at his lover's dead face as she lay in her coffin. Violet Trace comes to be called "Violent now because she had tried to kill what lay in a coffin" (79). Second, Violet seeks revenge against her husband by taking on a lover of her own. When neither succeeds, Violet turns to love— first by trying to love her husband and second by trying to love the dead lover (5).
Though Violet's appeal to love alone does not bring her back together with her husband, it reinforces the point Morrison makes in Beloved that conflicts are better solved through tolerance and compassion than through violence.
In Jazz, Morrison follows the same pattern of returning to the past to understand the origins of violence that shapes her other novels. As I have demonstrated, the conflation of
René Girard's theories of violence and sacrifice and Peter
Brooks' psychoanalytic narrative model provides insight into how Morrison's textual dynamics reflect her thematic concerns. Within this system, reciprocal violence within the community can be understood as a pattern of repetitions that corresponds to the metonymic sequence in Brooks' plots. To escape both the metonymic cycles and cycle of violence, the 258 communities and the texts themselves seek to reenact past traumas.
In Jazz, Morrison frequently identifies her returns to the past and returns of the repressed with chronological markers— for example, the narrator introduces the section treating Alice Manfred's history with "Like that day in July, almost nine years back" (53). Thus, in contrast to earlier novels, in Jazz, memories of the past erupt uncontrollably into the text less frequently. The intense narrative crisis familiar in Morrison's earlier novels does not develop in
Jazz on the same scale as her earlier novels; rather the locus of the narrative and communal crisis is restricted to the triangle: Joe— Dorcas— Violet. Morrison confuses time frames, but her shifts between the past and the present are far less abrupt or seamless in Jazz than they are in earlier works. In several instances, Morrison introduces conventional flashbacks through her limited-omniscient narrator. In one example, Joe lies in bed next to Violet and thinks of his first meeting with her: "They met in Vesper County, Virginia under a walnut tree" (30).
Nonetheless, a kind of local narrative crisis develops when Morrison blends past and present and narrative voice in passages involving Joe, Violet, and Dorcas. The past memories that erupt into the text invariably contain instances of violence and abandonment that help to explain violence in the present. Violet's history, for example, is tinged with the loss of more than just her Joe. In addition, it resonates with the loss of her mother and the disenfranchisement of her family by landlords and repo men 259
(98). Violet's mother had committed suicide when her husband hadn't returned after four years; her suicide comes just two weeks before his arrival. These painful memories are related in the first-person by Violet in a shift from Morrison's limited-omniscient narrator.
Similarly, Morrison uses both the limited-omniscient narrator and Joe's first-person narration to describe Joe's violent history of abandonment. Like Cholly Breedlove, Joe is abandoned by his mother at birth. The narrator describes
Joe's longing for his mother to acknowledge him:
She wouldn't even have to say the word "mother." Nothing like that. All she had to do was give him a sign, her hand thrust through the leaves, the white flowers, would be enough to say that she knew him to be the one, the son she had fourteen years ago, and ran away from. (37)
Joe does not receive the acknowledgement he seeks from his mother. Instead he "travels" with his "inside nothing . . . except for the fall of 1925 when he had somebody to tell it to. Somebody called Dorcas" (37) . His "inside nothing" drives Joe, an unlikely murderer, to shoot Dorcas when she leaves him.
The narrative crisis intensifies as the difference between time-past and time-present begins to erode. In a chapter that interrupts the forward-moving plot, Joe's first- person memories of his affair with Dorcas suddenly erupt into the text :
It's not a thing you tell to another man. I know most men can't wait to tell each other about what they going to get on the side. Put all their business in the street. They do it because the women don't matter all that much and they don't care what folks think about her. (121) 260
Time-past and time-present begin to slip into each other and the familiar narrative crisis begins to emerge when
Morrison allows Joe's first-person recollections to erupt
into the narrator's third-person account of his search for
Dorcas: "What would she want with a rooster? Crowing on a corner, looking at the chickens to pick over them. Nothing they have I don't have better" (182) . Morrison also begins to merge Joe's memories of Dorcas and the day he hunted her with the narrator's third-person account of his search for Wild (183). Narrative point-of-view also begins to shift more
rapidly, as Dorcas expresses in the first-person her fears that Joe will come after her: "He is coming for me. And when he does he will see I'm not his anymore. I'm Acton's and
it's Acton I want to please" (191).
The violence that emerges in these returns of the
repressed resembles very closely the violence that emerges
from the past of many of Morrison's other characters,
defining a chain of violence that is born of oppression. For
example, Joe thinks of how Dorcas shares his "inside
nothing," knew what it felt like (38). Joe thinks that maybe her nothing was worse since she knew her mother, had even been slapped in the face by her for some sass she could not remember. But she did remember, and told him so, about the slap across her face, the pop and sting of it and how it burned. How it burned, she told him. (38)
In fact, Dorcas' entire past is defined by the violence
so familiar to Morrison's characters; her violent past finds
its way into the text, whether it is through a first-person
narrator or through a limited-omniscient voice. We learn 261 from the narrator that Dorcas' father "was pulled of a streetcar and stomped to death, and Alice's sister [Dorcas' mother] had just got the news and had gone back home to try and forget the color of his entrails, when her house was torched and she burned crispy in the flames" (57). The riots by blacks in response to violence by whites and the loss of
Dorcas' mother and father in this violence testify to
Morrison's continued interest in the black community's response to white domination. In Jazz Morrison does not depict an entire community in crisis; nor does her narrative ever lapse into a narrative crisis that involves all her characters--the locus of both the communal and narrative crisis is limited. Nonetheless, a victim does seemingly give her life for the salvation of others and to end the reciprocal violence. Perhaps Felice serves as the character in Morrison's Jazz who has learned how to escape the cycle of reciprocal violence, whose redemption has been purchased through Dorcas' death.
Certainly she rejects her mother's theft of a ring "to get back at a whiteman who thought she was stealing even when she wasn't," although she loves the fact that her impossibly honest mother broke her own rules and Felice loved her for that (215) . Felice also rejects Dorcas' and the other girls' view of men, rejects the notion that what she should do is plot "how to get, then hold on to, a guy" (216). Finally,
Felice wants to skip "spring and . . . slid right on into summer," to avoid the rising blood of spring whose destructiveness she has witnessed (216) . 262
Felice's transformation aligns her with other Morrison characters who develop a new self-awareness and who avoid the destructive cycle of violence in the community. In The Bluest Eye, Claudia and Frieda promise renewal and a self- awareness that will lead them away from reciprocal violence.
Similarly, Sula's Nel Wright finds in her circles and circles of sorrow the compassion and insight to break free of the stranglehold of reciprocal violence. In Song of Solomon
Pilate gives her life to pass on traditional values, and
Beloved's community of women around 124 unites to battle evil from the past. Finally, in Jazz, Felice holds out the promise of renewal for herself and for Joe and Violet Trace. In Jazz, Morrison defies the expectations of an end- determined narrative— in other words, she gives us the entire story, then counts on metonymic substitutions to guide us to an understanding of the story. The effect is to draw readers into the story, to generate an even stronger desire to find a totalizing metaphor. The tactic is reminiscent of the opening strategy of her first novel, in which the narrator tells us that the "why" of the story cannot be explained, so that only the "how" is left to relate (3-7) . The "why" of this novel asks us to revise our understanding of her earlier novels as well.
Perhaps one of Morrison's greatest accomplishments is her ability to create unforgettable characters. Pilate Dead,
Beloved and Sethe, and Sula are among American literature's most fully realized characters. Much of what distinguishes these characters as African-American women is their relation to their communities and to African-American traditions. In 263
some cases, with Sula for example, the tradition of African-
American women characters is considerably extended and broadened. Moreover, studying violence within African-
American communities offers a look at Morrison's characters
in relation to their oppressors and at a specifically
African-American and female response to oppression.
Jazz's Violet Trace resembles Morrison's other female heroines in their struggles to forge an identity against the backdrop of oppression. Claiming that she forgot herself when she left the country for the City, Violet wrangles with three "me's," the Violet of the country, the Violet that tried to slash Dorcas' face, and another Violet. Felice,
Dorcas' girlfriend who visits the Traces' after Dorcas has been murdered, hears Violet talk about the "me" that she is finally left with after she has "killed" the others:
"How'd you get rid of her?" "Killed her. Then I killed the me that killed her. " "Who's left?" "Me. " I didn't say anything. I started thinking maybe the hairdresser was right again because of the way [Dorcas] looked when she said "me." Like it was the first she heard the word. (209)
Violet's war with herself(ves), her battles to create an identity, align her with Sula and her revelation that she is possessed of a self reminds us of Sethe's own "best thing"--a self-sufficient, whole self (273). As African-American women, both Sethe and Violet sturggle to define themselves within an oppressive social sturcture. When Violet discovers herself, she discovers a self that Felice describes as a
"tough somebody [Violet] favored and could count on. A 264 secret somebody you didn't have to feel sorry for or have to fight for" (210) .
However, the psychological realism and intimacy that
Morrison achieves for these characters through her use of a psychoanalytic narrative sturcture is missing in Jazz.
Jazz' s limited omniscient narrator tends to place characters at a distance. They are filtered through a narrator who can only speculate, guess, and editorialize about the characters.
It is only when the characters in Jazz are allowed to speak for themselves, and especially when their repressed memories erupt into the text, that the depth and familiarity we enjoy in most Morrison characters begins to emerge. Throughout her work, Morrison has explored the "why" of violence and community in a number of contexts including the individual, the family, the community, the larger community of the City, and, in Tar Baby, the African Diaspora. This study of violence as a response to oppression has also shown that Morrison treats violence in the broadest sense. By suggesting that the violence of oppression manifests itself not only in murder and rape, but also in abandonment, isolation, and psychological torment, Morrison redefines our notions of oppression and its inevitable and far-reaching effects. René Girard's theories of the scapegoat and violence help to demonstrate the role of desire and repetition in violence and the dynamics of violence within oppressed communities. Though violence cannot always be attributed to oppression, the frequent appearance of scapegoat figures in
Morrison's fiction testifies to the dire need for scapegoats 265
as a means of survival and as a way of preserving continuity within an oppressed community.
Moreover, a theory that combines Peter Brooks and René Girard shows how narrative strategy becomes an intrinsic function and expression of theme. This study of Jazz and
Morrison's other novels reveals that Morrison has continued to define and redefine the problem of violence and to explore how narrative technique functions as a vehicle for treating thematic concerns. The recovery of the past and its integration in the present become far more than ways of constructing novels— instead, they become means of safeguarding the present and future of an oppressed people. 266
NOTES
^ In response to those weakened fences, Morrison writes novels that, to borrow Marilyn Mobley's words, attempt "to reclaim and affirm . . . parts of their cultural heritage that society had begun to discard as irrelevant or marginal to the dominant national experience" (Mythic Wings 6) . According to Mobley, Morrison attempts to "achieve cultural transformation" by filling a void "in the lives of those black Americans who seem to have lost the oral tradition of storytelling that once sustained a sense of community" (11). In addition, Marilyn Mobley asserts that Morrison's fiction "[endows] commonplace people, places, and stories with the mythic grandeur and significance of archetypal narrative and ritual to redeem or rescue neglected literary material and the cultural values on which it is based" (II). Mobley points out that "Morrison does not lament the past but seeks a means of reclaiming what is good and useful to empower her people to survive difficult circumstances in the present" (23). Finally, she argues that Morrison wants to "celebrate the past" and "give continuity with the present" through her fiction (12).
^ In her study of Morrison, Mobley emphasizes the power of narrative to transform both teller, audience, and the tale itself, and argues that storytelling is central to to the "well-being and survival of the self and of the community" (15-16). Moreover, through her novels Morrison has, according to Mobley, sought to "reclaim and affirm cultural difference" through the power of narrative (13).
^ Trudier Harris shows how Morrison's work is aligned with a rich African-American tradition that draws on "oral forms" (Fiction and Folklore 1) . Yet Harris also shows how Morrison has "gone beyond the mere grafting of traditional items onto her fiction," transcending traditional uses of folk materials (7-8). Trudier Harris also argues that Morrison, through her "creation" of folk materials within her text, has "solved the problem of warring genres that plagued her predecessors" (7-8) . Catherine Rainwater also notes that Morrison's novels avoid "closure even as they employ traditional narrative models— bildungsromans, 'initiation stories,' etc.— that lead readers to expect closure" (99). BIBLIOGRAPHY
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