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“But the Greatest of These Is Love”: Desire for the Father and Agape in Toni Morrison’S Love *

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“But the Greatest of These Is Love”: Desire for the Father and Agape in Toni Morrison’S Love * Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 36.1 March 2010: 217-241 “But the Greatest of These Is Love”: Desire for the Father and Agape * in Toni Morrison’s Love Chia-chin Tsai Department of English Language and Literature Soochow University, Taiwan Abstract Love , Toni Morrison’s novel published in 2003, relates the entangled feelings of love and hostility among five African-American women related to a patriarch named Bill Cosey, aka “Big Daddy” and “Papa.” This paper aims at scrutinizing in light of Lacanian theory the various roles this Big Daddy assumes—the conceptual, symbolic father, the imaginary father and the real, anal father of jouissance. In so doing, the issue of the Father’s desire, which preoccupies almost every female character, and its intricate connection with agape , selfless love represented as a feminine act, can be explored so as to decipher the significance the title “Love” implies. The author argues that L, the ghostly narrator whose name is the subject of I Corinthians 13, “gives what she does not have” (a Lacanian definition of love) and sacrifices what is probably most precious to her—paradoxically the father not as a complete Other who knows the answer to the female subject’s question “Che Vuois?” but as another barred subject. This act of love enables Heed and Christine to retrieve their semi-pre-symbolic bonding and their code language, which simulates the pre-lapsarian plenitude in the form of the Lacanian lalangue . Keywords the symbolic father, the imaginary father, the real father of jouissance , desire, agape * This paper is the result of the research project funded by National Science Council (NSC 95-2411-H-216-001). The author thanks Professor Wen-ching Ho and Professor Pin-chia Feng for the enlightening advice they gave me about this research project. The author also feels indebted to Professor Ho for sending me a copy of the forward to the new edition of the novel Love published in 2005. 218 Concentric 36.1 (March 2010): 217-241 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. —1 Corinthians 13: 1, 13 Toni Morrison’s Love , published after her historical trilogy, Beloved , Jazz and Paradise , 1 once again deals with the African-American history including segregation and the Civil Rights movement, albeit with its fictional present set in the 1990s. In an interview, Morrison contended that this historical trilogy “explores love and its potential excesses, with Beloved focusing on parental love, Jazz on romantic love, and Paradise on love of God” (Sweeney 440). In view of this authorial interpretation, Love may be regarded as a sequel to the trilogy even though one may also argue that in all her oeuvres, love is a persistent thematic concern. The novel is also marked with the typical Morrisonian style—multiple perspectives, fragmentary or circular narrations that imply a traumatic past and a ghostly voice or presence that haunts the characters, their house or community. However, the collective historical trauma caused by slavery and the black migration is hidden from view this time, and the recurrent issue of African-American communal identity seems to recede into the backdrop of the narrative. Even though the influence of segregation and the Civil Rights movement is epitomized by the rise and fall of the “Cosey empire,” it is not the historical events that constitute the traumatic core of the narration.2 What is now brought to the foreground is, instead, African-American women’s struggle for a place and identity in the family. In Morrison’s oeuvre one can always find feminist agendas such as the social status, 1 Krumholz, Bouson, Davidson, Peterson and Widdowson all regard these three novels as a historical trilogy that address African-American history, while Gauthier regards these three novels as a trilogy of “excessive love” (396). In contrast, Mbalia holds that Jazz, Paradise and Love may be regarded as a trilogy of the plight of African-American women (213). 2 History still assumes a significant role in this novel. As Gallego points out, with the representation of the business of the black bourgeoisie, represented by Bill Cosey, Morrison rewrites the history of segregation and the Civil Rights movement from an African-American vantage point (93). In an interview with Martha Teichner, Morrison revealed that in the novel she aimed to depict the influence of the Jim Crow laws and the Civil Rights movement on African Americans. Represented from an alternative perspective, segregation results in the rise of African-American entrepreneurship and boosts the pride of blacks rather than traumatizing them; as she told Pam Houston, she meant to reveal “the very successful life of African American business before integration” (Houston 236). Tsai / “But the Greatest of These Is Love” 219 desire and subjectivity of African-American women in their own ethnic community. In Paradise , the issue of gender even outshines that of racial discrimination—five female outsiders, one of whom is indicated as a white, are murdered by men from the same African-American community. The double role of communal outsider and female outcast renders these women the scapegoats for the decline of a patriarchal community. In Love , women are once again the scapegoats, but this time, family becomes the center stage: it is a patriarchal arena where women compete with one another to secure their place and to survive. The title of the novel indeed sums up all the thematic concerns of all her oeuvre, but after reading the novel, one would find that most of the narration circles around the betrayal of love; as Morrison herself also points out in the foreword added to the novel in 2005: “People tell me that I am always writing about love. Always, always love. I nod, yes, but it isn’t true—not exactly. In fact, I am always writing about betrayal. Love is the weather. Betrayal is the lightning that cleaves and reveals it” (x). Love is such a story about the lightning of betrayal that simultaneously cleaves and reveals love: the innocent love between two little girls is cleaved by betrayal. With the depiction of the rise and decline of the Cosey Hotel and Resort, caused respectively by the enforcement and abolishment of the law of segregation (Jim Crow law), the plot is centered on the contest for the father’s favor among the so-called “Cosey women,” i.e. the proprietor’s young wife Heed, his daughter-in-law May and granddaughter Christine. The novel starts with the hostility and mutual betrayal among the Cosey women, with its focus placed on the rivalry between Heed and Christine; the real cause of their enmity, however, is not revealed until the meandering narration approaching near its ending. The nonlinear, poly-vocal narration, typical of Morrison’s style, reveals the presence of “traumatic displacement” disturbing not only the narration but also the time sequence (Wyatt 193). The trauma belatedly unveiled in the narrative is not racial but one induced by the untimely intrusion of sexuality into two girls’ childhood. What is more repugnant is the fact that it is a father figure’s sexuality that severs the emotional bond between two girls and “steals” their childhood. However, what complicates the plot is not the oblique narration caused by the hidden trauma but the way this trauma is intertwined with the family history, the mystery of the death of Bill Cosey and his will. The crucial information necessary for the readers to complete the jigsaw puzzle of the plot is supplemented by L’s monologue, which is italicized and inserted intermittently in the third-person narration. L’s voice forms what Wyatt indicates as “dual narration” (200) and serves to provide what is missing in the 220 Concentric 36.1 (March 2010): 217-241 narrative. In addition to the three Cosey women, L is a woman playing a crucial role in the Cosey family; her importance is made explicit in her identity as the cook of the hotel who also helps to raise Cosey’s son Billy Boy and his granddaughter Christine, in her role as a narrator who knows almost all the family secrets, and in the link of the initial L with the theme of I Corinthians 13—love, which is also the title of the novel. 3 Besides, she is the one who changes the fates of the Cosey women: closely related to Bill Cosey, 4 L is the one who poisons the patriarch with foxglove and forges his will in order to prevent him from throwing the Cosey women out in the street (201). L’s murderous action seems to contradict the name she bears, thereby making the book title enigmatic. Apart from L, who committed “patricide,” almost all the female characters are entrapped in the contest for paternal “love.” As the proprietor of a hotel and a resort, Bill Cosey, in providing black people with jobs and dignity during the segregation period, amounts to the patriarch of the black community. In other words, Cosey can be regarded as the center of the narrative, constructed and then deconstructed in the reading process. The chapter headings, as Sweeney notes, reveal the representation of Bill Cosey’s role as a patriarch and entrepreneur through the perspectives of those characters related to him (449). Entwined with this paternal figure is the enigmatic question: “Who is the sweet Cosey Child indicated in Cosey’s will”? As Wyatt also remarks, all the Cosey women “revolved endlessly around the enigma of the man’s desire” (198).
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