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 ” 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.

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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 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

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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). For both the Cosey women and Junior, being “the sweet Cosey Child” means not merely inheritance of the property but also winning the father’s affection. That is, the narration is directed to a question apropos of the father’s desire or the desire for the father. Given that all the female characters are ensnared by the question “ Che Vuoi ?”—“What does the Other want?”—and this question apparently starts all the torment of the Cosey family, this paper will probe into the linkage between the desire for the father and the significance of love embedded in the novel. To illustrate the three aspects in which the role of the father is represented in the novel, this paper is divided into four sections, in which the relationship between the father figure Bill Cosey and the other characters, especially the Cosey women, is

3 The title the author originally had in mind was “The Sporting Women ”; then she had changed the title into “L” before noticing that the narrator’s full name was “Love.” (Saur 224-5; Houston 232). 4 Wen-ching Ho, in his detailed analysis of L as a character, maintains that L is also Bill Cosey’s “one-time secret lover” (616).

Tsai / “But the Greatest of These Is Love” 221 construed respectively. The first section scrutinizes the role Bill Cosey assumes as a symbolic father. In the second section, the focus is placed on the representation of Bill Cosey as the imaginary father whose desire evokes the desire of the women around him, who regard him either as Papa or the Good Man. That which lies in the core of the traumatic memory of the Cosey women is the jouissance of an obscene anal father hidden behind the mask of the seemingly good Papa; therefore, the third section explores the jouissance of this real father, which Morrison represents as contamination that ultimately erodes “child’s first chosen love.” Elaborated in the final section are this pure love before the intrusion of “the father” and the significance of the act of love insinuated by L’s name.

I. “Big Daddy Everywhere”

Morrison admits that through Bill Cosey, she wants to represent the black bourgeoisie (Saur 225). When speaking of the structure of the novel in her interview with Silverblatt, she also indicates that the plot structure was designed to show Cosey’s responsibility and “how his life and his entrepreneurship affected, destroyed, helped, re-made a set of people who lived in that community”; therefore, “[e]verything has to accrue around him” (217). This fictional rendition makes Bill Cosey’s presence dominate the whole narrative even when he is absent. Bill Cosey’s identity as the proprietor of a hotel and a resort manifests his role not only as a capitalist but also a patriarch in the black community especially because his entrepreneurship, a pride for the community, provides black people job opportunities and offers a meeting place exclusively for blacks during the time of segregation. At home, his paternal role is emphasized by his identity as both a father and a grandfather, and in the community, he is the “benefactor.” As Mbalia contends, Bill Cosey is “the father to many of the Africans in town, especially the women” (215). In her interview with Houston, Morrison reveals that she “opted for what is generally not remembered or talked about: black vacation spots . . . where black people were very happy and content without integration” (236). Bill Cosey, a black version of the “embodiment of the American dream” (Roynon 33), starts his business with a resort during the period of segregation, a time Morrison herself calls “the best good times” (Siverblatt 221). However, the resort provides more than a place of happiness and content; it points to the question of how enjoyment (jouissance ) is treated in a black community—an issue already insinuated by the “potlatch” held by Baby Suggs in Beloved. Commingled with the agendas of the self-image and class consciousness, the accumulation of wealth used to be taken by

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the ex-slave community as inappropriate, excessive enjoyment. In Beloved , Baby Suggs’s “potlatch,” which the communal people consider too “excessive” for an ex-slave, causes the apathy of the community and indirectly leads to the infanticide; in Paradise , the excessive jouissance appears as that which an African-American community established on homogeneity must keep at bay and displace onto outsiders.5 In Love , the issue of jouissance is epitomized by the resort, “a playground for folk who felt the way [Bill Cosey] did” (103); that is, it is a place where, under the Jim Crow laws, the black bourgeoisies can legally “enjoy” together—“all [the black bourgeoisies] felt a tick of entitlement, of longing turned to belonging in the vicinity of the fabulous, successful resort controlled by one of their own” (42). Yet, it is insinuated that this enjoyment is transgressive. L’s monologue lays bare, though not without an irony, the association of Cosey’s wealth with “excessive” jouissance, i.e. the wealth even the black people would assume that an honest black was not expected to possess: “It comforts everybody to think of all Negroes as dirty poor. . . . White people liked that idea because Negroes with money and sense made them nervous. Colored people liked it because, in those days, they trusted poverty, believed it was a virtue and a sure sign of honesty” (103). It is revealed that the foundation of the playground is fortune tainted with “a whiff of evil and somebody else’s blood” (103). The lawful enjoyment of the bourgeoisie has a “dark,” illicit underside embodied by Bill Cosey’s father, alias “Dark.” Apropos of the enigmatic source of Bill Cosey’s wealth, L divulges that it was inherited from his father, a Courthouse informer who earned all his filthy money by betraying his own people:

Well paid, tipped off, and favored for fifty-five years, Daniel Robert Cosey kept his evil gray eye on everybody. For the pure power of it, people supposed, because he had no joy, and the money he got for being at the beck and call of white folks in general and police in particular didn’t bring comfort to him or his family. White called him Danny Boy. But to Negroes his initials, DRC, gave rise to the name he was known by: Dark . (emphasis added; 68)

5 In Paradise , to maintain the stability and wholeness of the all-black community, fantasized as a unified and consistent corporate body, the patriarchs of the Ruby community stigmatize the Convent women, in fact the constitutive “Out There” of the all-black society, in their collective fantasy as the Other who “enjoys” excessively and steals jouissance from them (Tsai 183-5).

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Behind the entrepreneurship that upholds the dignity of the black community and the phantasmagoria of the resort resides an obscene underside harboring excessive, undue jouissance inherited from a “dark” father. As Morrison points out in an interview, “[t]here is a Dark in every community—maybe in every family” (Houston 234). To put it more precisely, there is a Dark Father lurking behind “Big Daddy” and threatening to undermine the authority this conceptual father may speak for. With the chapter headings focusing on Cosey, Morrison leads the reader to ponder on the problematized image of Cosey the character and that of the father. All the female characters, inclusive of the non-Cosey women, are attached to Bill Cosey in one way or another. To illustrate, in the first two chapters, respectively entitled “Portrait” and “Friend,” which are accounted mainly from Junior’s and then from Vida’s vantage point, Cosey appears to be a handsome, munificent man, an idealized father figure and the role model of the community. To illustrate, Vida, his former employee, used to look at him “with adoring eyes” and spoke of him “with forgiving smiles” (40). In her eyes, Cosey is “royal” and the feud among the Cosey women is warfare for “the prince’s smile” (37). Considering Cosey “a commanding, beautiful man surrendering to feuding women, letting them ruin all he had built” (36), Vida blames the decline of his business on those women and even idealizes him as “a saint” because of the jobs he provided for her and her husband Sandler. The most grotesque example of Cosey’s admirers is Junior, an eighteen-year-old girl hired by Heed decades after Bill Cosey’s death. At the first sight, she “falls in love” with Cosey’s portrait, calls him her “Good Man” and searches for his presence everywhere in . Along with the meandering development of the plot, a larger-than-life image of a black father figure is collectively created through the reminiscence and interior monologues of the female characters until it is undermined by the exposition of more hidden truths. Apropos of this black entrepreneur, Morrison states in an interview that through the things he does, she intends to unfold “the idea of maleness,” what “everyone is looking for in masculinity: that benevolent or hostile notion of maleness” (Houston 235). What she actually unveils through this controversial character is more than this idea of masculinity—it is rather the different aspects of the father that are scrutinized. As a father and a grandfather, Bill Cosey should be able to assume the role as a stand-in of the symbolic father, exerting the function of the Name(s) of the Father6

6 In Seminar XVII, Lacan indicates that the father introduces to the child the master signifier, which “can be any signifier after all,” hence the Names of the Father (Lacan 124; Verhaeghe 44).

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but he fails. Through this character, Morrison once again manifests the malfunction of this symbolic position in the African-American family, resulting from the “feminization” of black masculinity during the time of slavery. As Gallego indicates, “[t]he black notion of patriarchy personified by Cosey forecloses any idea of kinship and community because . . . he miserably fails to foster a sense of family and to guide and protect its members” (94). Yoo also remarks that due to racial discrimination, it is hard for a black man to occupy “the conceptual place of ‘the Father’” (157). The “Dark” father who embezzles jouissance figuratively implies this absence of the symbolic or conceptual Father. Having learned about the source of Cosey’s fortune, Julia, Cosey’s wife, turns apathetic and before she passes away, she cries for her father instead of her husband. On the one hand, this implies that Julia is psychologically in need of a father as an authoritative figure in her life and, on the other hand, she has projected this figure onto her husband but the “dark” underside of this symbolic position disappoints her. Cosey, according to L, “transferred all of what he felt to his son” after his wife passes away (100). L’s account of the relationship between the father and the son also unfolds that it is the father’s/Other’s desire, not the mother’s, that the son intends to meet—“[T]he boy had that insight smart children use with grown-ups in order to stay important. Not by doing what they say, but by figuring out what they really want ” (emphasis added; 100). The son delights in being the father’s “trophy”/phallus, 7 while the father endeavors to turn his son into his own “shadow” (43). L reveals that after losing his only son, Cosey plans to get married again because he wants children “to fill the mirror for him the way Billy Boy used to” (emphasis added;104). Billy Boy marries May because his father wants him “to wed a devoted, not calculating, girl,” and May happens to be the kind of woman who “would neither disrupt nor rival the bond between father and son” (102). This father-son relationship is, to put in Lacan’s parlance, purely narcissistic and “imaginary”: the son is after the father’s desire, pondering over the question “ Che Vuoi ?”, while the father makes the son his own mirror image; moreover, without the presence of the mother, Billy Boy satisfies himself with the role of “imaginary phallus,” i.e. the signified of the desire of the mother supposed to be substituted by the Name of the Father in the process of symbolization (Chiesa, Subjectivity 91). With his father bragging about him in front of “yawning friends,” Billy Boy merely

7 The phrase “trophy son” is used by the author herself in the interview with Houston, in which Morrison describes Billy Boy as the son Bill Cosey “loved and bragged about, but loved in a trophy way” (234).

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“smiled at the fat, cherished lies” (101, 102). He is more like the imaginary phallus that makes the father, instead of the mother, feel “whole.” This also explains why after Billy Boy dies, Cosey buys the red barber’s chair they used to sit in and puts it in his own room as a lost “phallic” object for mourning. 8

II. The Imaginary Father: What Does the Father/Other Desire?

As mentioned, Bill Cosey is inept in sustaining the symbolic role of the father despise his occupation of this symbolic position—he is “at a loss as to how to act as Billy Boy’s father or May’s father-in-law” (Gallego 94). As an imaginary father, he is idealized as a benefactor and protector patronizing the weak and the needy, an image in which the female characters invest their desire. May’s desire is to satisfy the Cosey men’s desire, the father’s more than the son’s (102). Christine, May’s daughter, reveals that May wants whatever Bill Cosey wants—“She was Daddy’s girl” (184). Unlike her mother-in-law, May convinces herself of the validity of Cosey’s wealth, believing that Cosey “came from a long line of quiet, prosperous slaves and thrifty freedom” (136). It is the Father’s desire she caters to and in every way she endeavors to sustain the validity of the symbolic position that Cosey is supposed to stand in. Despite being a mother herself, May endeavors to be the girl Daddy favors. She and L used to be like “the back of a clock,” the face of which is, without doubt, the patriarch (103). After Bill Cosey marries his child bride, May resents being “[r]ewarded by watching her father-in-law marry her twelve-year-old daughter’s playmate and put that playmate ahead of everything, including herself, her daughter, and all she had worked for ” (emphasis added; 138). In May’s perspective, an outsider of no social superiority has stolen her position—her entitlement to the “phallus.” At the age of fifty-two, Cosey marries Heed, an eleven-year-old girl coming from “Up Beach,” a low-class district. From Heed’s perspective, Cosey is both a benefactor and a father saving her from a ditch-like slum though deep in her heart she knows very clearly that she is nothing but a commodity sold by her own father. She fantasizes that Bill Cosey is a subject supposed to know the hidden significance or value of her life: “Only Papa knew better, had picked her out of all he could have

8 As Luepnitz points out, in Lacanian theory, the phallus is “a position through which different objects circulate,” and children can be one of these objects that make the subject feel complete (226).

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chosen. Knowing she had no schooling, no abilities, no proper raising, he chose her anyway while everybody else thought she could be run over” (72-3). Heed even romanticizes her premature marriage, claiming that her father recognized “a true romance” the moment he saw it (62). Wyatt points out that in the first eight chapters Heed projects onto her life story the Cinderella story pattern, which is “a cultural myth so fundamental to the ideology of social mobility that sustains capitalist culture” (208). Ensnared in this cultural myth, a collective social fantasy, she depicts herself as a chosen poor girl whose “slippers” many women would like to be in (61). However, in her version of the Cinderella story, the prince is a paternal figure, called “Papa,” with whom she feels safe “no matter what he muttered in his sleep” but who also puts her across his knee and spanks her “with a kind of old-timey grace” (162, 126). The reader’s attention to Cosey’s marriage to a minor, along with the anxiety over his pedophilic inclination, is distracted by Heed’s “seductive language of romantic love” (Wyatt 208), her depiction of Cosey as a savior and the rivalry among the Cosey women. Heed’s side of story that her marriage is “almost thirty years of perfect bliss” (62) is undermined by the narrator’s exposé that May’s and Christine’s hostility turns her married life into warfare. In almost two thirds of the novel, the author makes explicit how the fantasy of a protective potent father conducts the desire of the female characters. One of the things that irritate Christine is the image of her playmate, instead of herself, sitting in her grandfather’s lap. It is excruciating for her seeing her best friend with her own grandfather—as she reveals her annoyance to Junior, “One day we built castles on the beach; next day he sat her in his lap. One day we were playing house under a quilt; next day she slept in his bed. One day we played jacks; the next she was fucking my grandfather. . . . One day this house was mine; next day she owned it” (131-2). The father’s favor or desire also means a place at home, i.e. a place in the familial-symbolic structure dominated by the Father. With the quarrels that occur on and off after the wedding, what Christine resents most is the fact that it is her mother, a phallic mother catering to “the Big Man” in the house (133), who chooses to send her away from home. Having graduated from high school, Christine shows off her knowledge of grammar to Heed and takes great delight in seeing her grandfather take her side against Heed; her delight becomes “rampant as the three of them—the real Coseys —left together, drove off in the big automobile, the unworthy one nowhere to be seen ” (emphasis added; 134). The statement highlights the family name that signifies not only kinship but also a symbolic identity formed in the familial-symbolic system. This time, Heed is the one “nowhere to be seen.”

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Heed in fury sets Christine’s room on fire soon afterwards; as a consequence, it is Christine again who is sent away, and the father never casts a glance at her: “He never once looked at her. He had laughed” (135). She hitherto starts her quest for sugar daddies and for a place to stay as home but realizes that there is one thing in common among her grandfather’s hotel, her school and Manila’s whorehouse—the male entity (92). Her feeling of being deprived of a home lasts years after Cosey’s death. Consulting a lawyer about her inheritance, Christine frets about being replaced and deprived again of a place in the family: “Replacing me, getting rid of me. I’m always last; all the time the one being told to go, get out” (95). The quest for the father’s desire is especially intertwined with an object Christine and Heed often quarrel about—the silverware on which are engraved two hooked letter C’s. According to L, one year after his son’s death, Cosey orders some silverware and has the initials C. C. engraved. Christine, having every meal with a silver spoon with the engraved double C’s, believes that they are her initials, whereas Heed insists that they are one letter doubled. In other words, the silver spoon Christine always keeps in her apron pocket is a stand-in of objet petit a , the cause of her desire, which, hooked to the question of the Other’s desire, also points to her identity as a Cosey, i.e. her symbolic place. To Christine, the double C’s function like the Lacanian letter “which marks the destiny of the subject and which [she] must decipher” (Evans 100). However, Morrison renders this object of desire insubstantial by turning these engraved letters into an empty signifier pointing to nothing, as a letter should be. Even L, the one who knows the most of the family secrets, has no idea about who this C. C. is: “Women trailed [Bill Cosey] every where and I kept my eyes open for who he might pick. The hooked C’s on the silverware worried me because I thought he took casual women casually. But if doubled C’s were meant to mean Celestial Cosey, he was losing his mind” (104). With Cosey’s death, the enigma of the identity of C. C. becomes amalgamated with the riddle of the identity of “My Sweet Cosey Child” indicated in the will L forges. Even after the death of the Big Daddy, the desire, or power, of the Father still prevails through his “will,” albeit a counterfeit. The will functions like the phallus for it represents Big Daddy’s affection/desire on which each woman has “a unique claim” (98). A question it evokes is: Who is this “sweet Cosey child” to whom the dead father bequeaths the Monarch Street house and all his money? (79) The phrase “my sweet Cosey child” insinuates that the heir is the father’s desire, the apple of the father’s eye. Both Heed and Christine believe that they are the referent of this signifier of desire: “Heed’s claim was strong—especially since she called her husband Papa. Yet since, biologically speaking, Christine was the only ‘child’ left,

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her claim of blood was equal to Heed’s claim as widow. Or so she and May thought” (79). It is conspicuous that the author implants an irony in this struggle over the “will” of the dead Father: the will is forged by a woman to save the other women from being thrown out on the street. Regardless of the deliberate ironical twist in this rendition, the episode still lays bare the fact that functioning like the name of the Father, the will is a fiction fabricated in such a way as to formulate the desire of the female subjects. Though remaining a bystander throughout the wrestling among the Cosey women, even L herself harbors a romantic fantasy about this father figure. Recalling the first time she saw Cosey at the age of five, L depicts a melodramatic scenario of romantic love:

It’s noteworthy, I suppose, that the first time I saw Mr. Cosey, he was standing in the sea, holding Julia, his wife in his arms. I was five; he was twenty-four and I’d never seen anything like that. Her eyes were closed, head bobbing; her light blue swimming dress ballooned or flattened out depending on the waves and his strength. She lifted an arm, touched his shoulder. He turned her to his chest and carried her ashore. I believed then it was the sunlight that brought those tears to my eyes—not the sight of all that tenderness of the sea. (64)

Given that L is only two years older than Billy Boy, this mnemonic image undoubtedly is also a fantasmatic image of romantic love. Just as Heed romanticizes her relationship with her Papa, so L depicts the handsome man on the shore as an ideal lover. In her reminiscence, L adds that nine years later, after Julia passes away, “when I heard he was looking for house help, I ran all the way to his door ” (emphasis added; 65). It appears that when looking at the romantic scenario, L desires to be “in the picture.” Taking care of Billy Boy and cooking for Cosey for fifty years, L plays the role of housewife in the family; moreover, she reveals that she devotes all her attention to this man—“I pay attention and know all about him. That kind of understanding can only come from practice and I had a lot of that with Mr. Cosey” (100). L’s account manifests that the fundamental fantasy formed at the beach sustains her desire for this father figure for years and thereof makes the beach her favorite “setting” (105).

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As his portrait is described as “looming” behind Heed’s bed, the “imago” of the father turns out to be a ghostly (omni-) presence—a gaze returning from the past to its female beholders. This imago is interwoven with the mysterious gaze reflected through the portrait. Vida, for instance, perceives a “powerful, generous friend gazed out from the portrait” and the narrator indicates that the reason is “she didn’t know who he was looking at” (45). The fact is Bill Cosey was looking at Celestial, a prostitute he loves, when he took the photo from which the portrait was painted. Inside that look, there is “something in him but more than him,” the hidden agalma , which attracts the female beholders. The charismatic image of the father, i.e. the portrait, is ultimately enlarged to its extreme because of Junior, an eighteen-year-old intruder stepping into the feud between Heed and Christine. The portrait always already returns the gaze; unlike the unseeing gaze of the sardine can mentioned in Lacan’s Seminar XI, which exposes young Lacan’s being out of place in a port, the portrait is always already seeing Junior and makes her feel “home” the moment she sees it. Junior doesn’t have a chance to know her father. Her father called her “Junior,” after himself. Though her mother Vivian chose a name for her, she was stuck to the nickname, just “Junior,” without a last name. When being inquired of her last name the first day in school, she murmured, “Junior Vivian” (55). This account reveals her confusion about her identity, her hesitance in deciding whether as Junior, she is the absent father’s daughter or as Vivian, the mother’s. It is also related that she spent her childhood longing for her father and “looking out for the tall, handsome man who named her after himself to show how he felt about her” (55). The portrait of Bill Cosey in Junior’s eyes is “[a] handsome man with a G. I. Joe chin and a reassuring smile that pledged endless days of hot, tasty food; kind eyes that promised to hold a girl steady on his shoulder while she robbed apples from the highest branch” (emphasis added; 30). The “G. I. Joe chin” recalls a G. I. Joe doll this fatherless girl stole at eleven because her mother had told her that her father was a soldier. Then, she projects her desire for a strong, protective “G.-I.-Joe” father onto the man in the portrait. The moment she lays eyes on the portrait, she knows that she is home (60). Bill Cosey, whom she always calls “my Good Man” (178), is fantasized to be the father she never had and longs to have. Junior desires her Good Man to such an extent that she hallucinates about his presence through the fatherly gaze she perceives—she forecloses the lack that the gaze qua objet petit a represents. For instance, when listening to Heed’s talk about her wedding, she is conscious of his gaze and anxious about her outfit—“He won’t like this old-lady suit I got on” (62).

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The situation turns out to be repulsive when Junior starts to fantasize that “it pleased [Cosey the portrait] to see her taking care of his wife; as it pleased him to watch her and Romen wrestle naked in the backseat of his twenty-five-year-old car; just as it tickled him to know she was wearing his shorts” (124). She indulges herself in living under the fatherly gaze and becomes anxious when she does not smell him or hear him: “She looked for him in the other rooms, because when she was sitting in his study and wearing his tie, there was no trace of aftershave; no ‘Hey, sweet thing’ whispered in her ear” (130). This psychotic hallucination can be understood via a statement made by Verhaeghe regarding Lacan’s revision of the Oedipus Complex in his Seminar XVII; he argues that viewed from the level of discourse, since a woman is reduced to objet petit a , “she demands that the man assume an almighty position from which to be able to name her and provide her with an identity of her own. Should she ever find such a man, The Man, she will find psychosis” (46). It is after Romen licks her “merged toe,” a symbol of her trauma, that the hallucination of the Good Man completely evaporates. The “lollipop lick” causes a jitter that makes her feel “wide open and whole” and hereafter lose interest in looking for her Good Man or sniffing out his aftershave. Before the “lollipop lick,” Junior “had suppressed suspicion of his betrayal” because the Good Man had been missing for a few days; after “the lollipop was tasted,” the Good Man “vanished from his painting altogether, leaving her giddy and alone with Romen” (196). The possessive power of the Father gives way to the healing power of the “lollipop lick” of the lover.

III. The Obscene, Real Father of Jouissance

Through Junior, Morrison unfolds the real impossibility underlying the fantasy of “Good Man,” just as the void underlying the masculine fantasy of “The Woman,” which, Lacan claims, does not exist. 9 Moreover, through Junior’s fantasy and then her psychotic hallucination, Morrison manifests the eroticization of the longing for a father, resulting from the evaporation of the familial structure. Along with the development of the meandering narration, the romanticization of Heed’s marriage with “Papa” and the idealization of the imaginary father are both emasculated by the gradual exposition of the traumatic scenes—the premature

9 It is not only a fantasy that is involved. Lacan in his unpublished seminar Le Sinthome indicates that the Woman is one of the names of the father, referring to the enjoyment of the real father, a situation which will be explored later in this section.

Tsai / “But the Greatest of These Is Love” 231 encounter with sexuality. In so doing, the author also exposes the obscene underside of the symbolic father—the real, anal father of jouissance , who points to the pre-historical, Freudian primordial father of the horde, the only man who possesses all women. Žižek clarifies the affinity between this primordial father and the symbolic father in Metastases of Enjoyment :

On the one hand there is the oedipal father: the symbolic-dead father, Name-of-the-Father, the father of Law who does not enjoy, who ignores the dimension of enjoyment; on the other hand there is the “primordial” father, the obscene, superego anal figure that is real-alive, the “Master of Enjoyment. . . . [P]rimordial father” is . . . the result of the dissolution of traditional symbolic authority. . . . The symbolic father qua dead—that is ignorant of enjoyment—allows us to keep fantasies structuring our enjoyment at bay, to maintain a minimal distance between them and the social space; whereas the obscene “anal” father directly animates the phantasmatic support of our being which thereby immediately pervades the entire social field. (206)

As Žižek points out, the appearance of the obscene, real father results from the “dissolution” of the symbolic authority, which serves to keep fantasy at bay. That which is unveiled thereafter is a capricious master who is not bound by the law and who “wants it all” (Zupan čič 189). Bill Cosey’s incompetence as a stand-in for symbolic authority is underlined by his role as the capricious master who enjoys all—“He was the Big Man who, with no one to stop him, could get away with it and anything else he wanted” (133). Whether as a capitalist or a patriarch, he is the one who “enjoys” regardless of the confinement of the Law. One of the hints the author provides is his secret deals with the white cops. A father figure with “an avatar of libidinal excess and moral depravity” (Sathyaraj and Neelakantan 3), Cosey not only presides over the family but simultaneously threatens to transgress the incest taboo. The narrative structure reflecting the “delayed functioning of memory” bespeaks the presence of trauma (Wyatt 195). The fantasmatic scenarios portraying an idealized munificent, protective and authoritative father figure also serve to veil the traumatic encounter with the real, anal father of jouissance . Heed’s complete name “Heed the Night” actually foreshadows the threat of the looming “Dark” father, i.e. the dark underside of the symbolic father she and Christine must “heed.”

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L makes explicit this dark underside, albeit belatedly: “Whenever I see [Bill Cosey’s] righteous face correcting Heed, his extinguished eyes gazing at Christine, I think Dark won out ” (emphasis added; 200). This Dark refers not only to Daniel Robert Cosey but also implicitly to Bill Cosey’s “inside dirtiness” that is unspeakable and traumatic to both Heed and Christine (192). Resembling the father of the primal horde, who does not subjugate himself to a transcendent law (Grigg 65), Cosey hovers around the borderline between the law and the transgressive desire, tending to regard women around him as lovers (Gallego 94). Moreover, the father-daughter relationship is even “eroticized” in an implicit way (Yoo 157). It is unveiled near the end of the novel that Heed’s romanticization of her relationship with Papa is actually a way to come to terms with the obscene father. Before marrying Cosey, Heed has already traumatically confronted adult sexuality, which is beyond her comprehension. Dressed in Christine’s swimming suit, she was sexually harassed by Cosey. What happened then is accounted in the present tense to call attention to the endurance of this traumatic memory:

He touches her chin, and then—casually, still smiling—her nipple. . . . Heed stands there for what seems an hour but is less than the time it takes to blow a perfect bubble. He watches the pink ease from her mouth, then moves away still smiling. Heed bolts back down the stairs. The spot on her chest she didn’t know she had is burning, tingling. (191)

This obscene “father” gives an enigmatic smile that expresses the phallic jouissance unknown to a prepubescent girl. The traumatic incidence then changes her feeling about her own body—a part of her body she didn’t know she had is now burning and tingling because of shame. Not until this revelation does the reader realize why Heed takes a bath more than once a day and why she is worried about losing her “skin memory, the body’s recollection of pleasure” (77). The skin memory of her wedding night—“No penetration. No blood. No eeks of pain or discomfort. Just this man stroking, nursing, bathing her” (77)—functions as a shelter against the traumatic shock and the memory traces it subsequently left on her body. That is, the later skin memory is a cover-up of the earlier traumatic skin memory. With the recollection of the powerful arms holding her in water, the bath is in fact a way to cleanse the earlier memory traces. Also related in the present tense, a similar traumatic shock hits Christine when, to find her playmate Heed, she looks up

Tsai / “But the Greatest of These Is Love” 233 toward her bedroom window and sees her grandfather masturbating in her room. That night, the shadow of a real father of jouissance hovers there—“She didn’t have to glance at the window or see the curtains yield before a breeze to know that an old man’s solitary pleasure lurked there ” (emphasis added; 192). The abhorrent scene makes her ashamed of her grandfather and of herself. The shame is henceforth displaced onto Heed as hatred. Not until they articulate it do they realize that the shame is actually “twin shames” (190). The shock is repressed and unable to be “symbolized,” not even in their secret language “idagay”: “[T]his particular shame was different and could not tolerate speech—not even in the language they had invented for secrets” (192). In Heed’s case, the father of jouissance has to be transformed into a beneficent, protective father, a desire object for the female characters. Morrison implicates the transgression of incest resulting from the failure of the Law of the Father and the consequent eroticization of the father-daughter relationship—it is hard not to notice that it is Christine’s swimming suit that Heed wears when the harassment happens, and it is also in Christine’s own room that the obnoxious scenario appears. This obscene, capricious father lurks all along behinds the larger-than-life image of the Father the female characters fantasize. Not until the end of the novel, before Heed’s death, do Christine and Heed ultimately come to the realization that the father whose desire they are obsessed with is also an obscene father who stole their childhood. Moreover, in their reconciliatory, reminiscent conversation, the author has them admit the fictitiousness of the fantasmatic Big Daddy:

We could have been living our lives hand in hand instead of looking for Big Daddy everywhere. He was everywhere. And nowhere. We make him up? He made himself up. We must have helped. (189)

The Big Daddy can be found everywhere, but since he is merely a fantasmatic construct, he is nowhere to be found. Morrison also suggests here that women have helped make this Big Daddy up. In her interview with Silverblatt, Morrison indicates that women in the novel are “complicit in that movement of constantly making [Cosey] the big daddy, the one who did it all ” (emphasis added; 222).

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IV. “The Greatest Thing Is Love” —Agape vis-à-vis the Desire for the Father

In Love , Morrison seems to make up the regret she leaves in Sula . As Houston points out in the interview with the author, in Sula the two close friends Nell and Sula never “reconnect,” whereas in Love , Christine and Heed do (230). Pin-chia Feng argues that the latter can be regarded as “a belated sequel” to the former in view of the depiction of sisterhood (45). In this novel, the sisterhood is portrayed even more like a state of pre-oedipal oneness. The intrusion of the father—a twisted version of the Oedipalization—results in Christine’s and Heed’s premature entry into patriarchal libidinal economy dominated by the phallus, or more precisely, the father’s desire. As Wyatt remarks, even after Cosey’s death, Heed and Christine “remain preoccupied with the signifiers of capitalist patriarchy, with the terms that the Law of the Father endows with meaning: inheritance, property, legitimacy” (198). In addition, this paternal intervention, while severing their emotional tie, imposes on Christine and Heed the patriarchal logic of desire, rendering them enthralled by the contest for the father’s desire. At the end of this novel, it dawns on them, albeit too late, that it is not really the Father they desire; the endeavors they have made indirectly aim at retrieving the childhood love which transcends the distinction of sex and class. That is, the traumatic encounter with the obscene father and the patriarchal fantasy that conducts their desire for the father’s recognition distort their love for each other. The author subverts this patriarchal logic of desire by revealing the “pre-lapsarian” status of the affection between these two girls. Heed thinks marrying Cosey means getting closer to Christine, and what Christine has in mind is to stay with Heed even in her honeymoon. As one of them says to the other, “[The Father] took all of you away from me” (194). The kind of love they have for each other is, as L describes it, “a child’s first chosen love”:

If such children find each other before they know their own sex, or which one of them is starving, which well fed; before they know color from no color, kin from stranger, then they have found a mix of surrender and mutiny they can never live without. Heed and Christine found each other. (italics original; 199)

The absence of the mother causes the two girls to regard each other as their first love object; moreover, Morrison emphasizes the kind of love Christine and Heed

Tsai / “But the Greatest of These Is Love” 235 have is a utopian state that has never been contaminated by Oedipalization/symbolization because their first strong “passion” is pre-symbolic and thus pre-sexualized. Both girls lose a way to verbalize their love for each other because it is precluded from the soico-symbolic system governed by the Name of the Father and the signifier of the Father’s desire. The “pre-lapsarian” state before the intrusion of adult sexuality is epitomized by their secret language. Intrigued by a male voice saying, “Hey, Celestial,” conveying peculiar emotion that is beyond the comprehension of little girls, Heed and Christine imitate that voice whenever they want to say “Amen” or to “acknowledge a particularly bold, smart, risky thing” (188); they also invent the language “idagay” “for intimacy, gossip, telling jokes on grown-ups” (188). The code they invent is more than the creation of their own “system of signification” (Burr 172); as a site where resistance may arise, this language deforms the symbolic system by copying only the intonation of the voice “Hey, Celestial” without carrying its original meaning, not to mention the derision it implies. Besides, this secret language simulates the pre-lapsarian plenitude with the indecipherable and meaningless suffix “idagay” functioning like the Lacanian lalangue , “maternal tongue,” which points to the non-phallic, Other-jouissance that is beyond the symbolic domain. 10 “Hey, Celestial” and “idagay” are senseless to the girls but they provide surplus enjoyment. With the absence of mothering in this novel (O’Reilly 175), the maternal, pre-symbolic relationship is replaced first by this verbal game and then by the merging of their identities in their last dialogues, which form “a new narrative space in which past and present, childhood and age, coexist and unite” (Wyatt 210). The dissolution of the distinction between the speakers, as revealed in the quote at the end of section III, and the abrupt evaporation of the third-person narrator, i.e. the absence of the third-term, manifests a symbiotic condition characteristic of the mother-child dyad. L is the only one who witnesses and acknowledges this first chosen-love. She “hums” her observation of the Cosey family and her comments on the characters from a distance. Her first-person reminiscent narration makes the reader associate her name L with the title of the book. Throughout the narrative the letter L emerges on and off like a floating signifier, the meaning of which is uncertain, and this ambiguity causes anxiety during the reading process until at the end she reveals that

10 Lalangue is a term Lacan coins to refer to the infantile babbling that brings about jouissance (Evans 97). As Žižek defines it in How to Read Lacan , lalangue is “the space of illicit pleasure that defy any normativity (71).

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her name is the subject of First Corinthians, chapter 13 (199). With this revelation, this floating signifier L seems to anchor its signified, love, but her voice turns out to be more “disembodied” because it is one dissociated not only from the body of the speaker but also from time and space; as Wyatt points out, “[t]he signifier Love , because it is a title, floats free of context, available to any and all of a reader’s associations to the word” (201). What floats free of context is not simply the signifier “Love” but also L’s voice since L turns out to be a ghost whose voice “floats free” out of its temporal and spatial context. This feature complicates the reading process. In the narrative, Cosey and L are two phantoms haunting the house; the former affects the female characters with his gaze, i.e. the portrait, and his aftershave smell, while the latter asserts her presence with her humming voice and the smell of baking bread. It is her feminine voice and smell of nourishment that exorcize the fatherly and masculine gaze and smell “in the name of Love.” Being an ancestor-like figure (Ho 660), L plays a maternal role resembling that of Baby Suggs in Beloved or Connie in Paradise. As the cook of the hotel and the family, she is a nurturer like other maternal ancestral figures in previous novels. Her name seems to endow her with a keener insight than the others’ to understand that Heed and Christine are “the kind of children who can’t take back love, or park it” and that when separation occurs to them, it “cuts to the bone” (200). Besides, she is also the first one who breaks away from the web of difference weaved by the phallus qua the signifier of desire and drops the question apropos of the Father’s desire. The author does not reveal lucidly why and how, yet L is apparently the only woman who harbors a romantic fantasy about this paternal figure but is able to traverse this fantasy, no longer seeing this Father-Other as the one who holds the answer to the question “ Che Vuois ?” Instead of regarding the Other as complete with the answer to the meaning of the subject’s life, what she perceives in Cosey is a barred subject as she is: “You could call him a good bad man, or a bad good man. . . . He was an ordinary man ripped, like the rest of us, by wrath and love” (200). In other words, even though she used to be infatuated with the romanticized masculinity and paternity Cosey represented at the beach, after long years working for him, what she sees in Cosey is not the idealized potent Father but an ordinary man who is also lacking. In Lacanian terms, L shows that which is characteristic of love, not of desire, since “love is always love for the Other in so far as he is lacking . . . because of his limitation” (Žižek, Did Somebody Say 57). In his reading of Lacan’s Seminar VIII, “‘Le Ressort de L’Amour ,’” Chiesa also points out that

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“love relies on what the other lacks, and not on what he has” (emphasis original; 68).11 L poisons Cosey, a man she has cared about for more than fifty years, because she finds that he plans to revise his will and bequeath nothing to the Cosey women. To forestall a tragedy, L murders the eighty-one-year-old “father” and counterfeits the father’s will, i.e. his desire, despite the fact that this counterfeit desire continues to manipulate those women “in the name of the Father.” Assuming that “at eighty-one he wasn’t going to get better’ (201), she chooses to sacrifice Cosey in order to preserve a home for the three Cosey women. Though she cannot drive, L keeps Cosey’s ’55 convertible for herself in the will—probably just as an object to remember him by (88); this deliberation, however, may also be taken as a proof of her affection for Cosey (Ho 656). Therefore, in killing Cosey, she demolishes what is very likely most precious to her; it is a feminine, ethical act in the Lacanian sense, which somehow resembles Sethe’s, whereby, according to Žižek, the desperate mother shows her fidelity to the Thing by sacrificing also the Thing itself ( Fragile Absolute , 154). L “sacrifices” the man she loves and serves for decades in her own name, showing her fidelity to that which her name stands for—love. The deliberate allusion to First Corinthians Chapter 13 underlines the importance of love, “But the greatest of these is love,” which L makes her business. Morrison contends that L’s love is generous love—“Jesus at his best” (Houston 233). Žižek, referring to the Lacanian logic of sexuation, the masculine all and feminine not-all, in his reading of First Corinthians Chapter 13, argues that in Paul’s description, agape “enjoins us to ‘unplug’ from the organic community into which we are born” and manifests an act of “clinging to an element that disturbs the balance of All” ( Fragile Absolute 121). In contrast with the Pauline-Lacanian dialectic between the Law and desire which, founded on the logic of All and its exception, is masculine and phallic, agape belongs to the realm of the feminine because it makes even the All, or the complete knowledge, incomplete, i.e. not-All. Thus, in killing the Big Daddy, which amounts to renouncing her desire, L “unplugs” herself from the patriarchal socio-symbolic community she lives in and disturbs its balance by swerving from the law of desire to the act of love. As Badiou, following Lacan, points out, there is “dis-relation [ dé-rapport ]” between love and desire (273). Figuratively speaking, the father’s will stands for the object of desire,

11 Chiesa in this paper also makes a distinction between real love and false love, the latter being imaginary and narcissistic because the lover falls in love with his or her own ideal image (69, 71). L’s love is definitely not founded on the imaginary because she acknowledges the lack in Cosey.

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the stand-in of the objet a , which the Cosey women look for; if interpreted according to Lacan’s dictum of love in Seminar VIII—to love is “to give what one does not have” (Evans 103), L gives to Christine and Heed what she does not have , that which she works and lives for over these fifty years—the epitome of the objet a , i.e. the father’s house/favor for May, Christine and Heed. As for Christine and Heed, love returns when they stop proving that they are worthy of the father’s love and when they stop desiring to please the fantasized Other as the one who knows what he wants, i.e. when they stop catering to the desire of that Other. Near the end of her final monologue, L says that her forged will gives Christine and Heed a reason to “stay connected” and to figure out how precious the “tongue” is (201). Probably referring to the secret language “idagay,” L indicates that the tongue can rescue women from the oppressive power or establishment symbolized by the “the attention of Police-heads hunting desperate women and hardheaded, misraised children” (201). As aforementioned, the word “tongue” insinuates a linguistic system resisting the established symbolic edifice. However, the allusion to First Corinthians 13 inevitably brings to the reader’s mind the connection between the tongue and love indicated in verse one: “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.” Morrison associates language with love as she comments on the women’s complicity in fabricating the big daddy: “[Christine and Heed are] at the point now where nothing but language can save them. And that’s when you can say L-O-V-E” (Silverblatt 222). The tongue can be used for accusation as is revealed by Christine’s hateful yelling meant to hurt Heed: “Ou-yidagay a ave-slidagay! E-hidagay ought-bidagay ou-yidagay ith-widagay a ear’s-yidagay ent-ridagay an-didagay a andy-cidagay ar-bidagay!” (“You a slave! He bought you with a year’s rent and a candy bar!”), and the word “Ave-slidagay”(slave) “ rang in [Heed’s] head” (emphasis added; 129). Without love, their “tongue” is none other than resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. Only when they are reconnected does the tongue that expresses love save them. “Love never ends”; therefore, at the very end of the narrative, Love “hums” on. Through Bill Cosey, Morrison represents the three different faces of the father, a role an African-American man may have found difficult to deal with due to the trauma of slavery, which undermined masculinity and the symbolic position of the father in an African-American family. In the novel, the father who is supposed to occupy the symbolic position has already been overshadowed by a “Dark,” real father, who amassed illegitimate jouissance ; meanwhile, the same father is fantasized as the ideal paternal benefactor, who is able to “enjoy” the women

Tsai / “But the Greatest of These Is Love” 239 around him when or/and because his desire enslaves them. With her meandering narration, Morrison proffers a maneuver in almost all her oeuvres to cope with the symbolic system infiltrated with the desire of the (white) Father; in this novel, through L’s monologue, she points to the “not-all” of the feminine as a means of salvation for women entrapped in the snare of the desire of the Father-Other and consequently catering to this desire. Having traversed her own romantic fantasy for Bill Cosey, L sacrifices what she has never had, forges the will of the Father to serve her own purpose and saves Cosey’s women from being thrown out of the house. She is also the only one who is able to understand “the child’s first chosen love,” a pre-symbolic and thus pre-sexualized sort of love that compensates for the absence of parental love. In so doing, Morrison renders the ghostly character-narrator L an embodiment of agape , which makes the tongue no longer the sound of resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. “Love” goes on, Morrison seems to imply, as L’s monologues transcend the confinement of temporality, “humming” the last word in the novel.

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About the Author Chia-chin Tsai (蔡佳瑾) is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, Soochow University. Her research interests include post-feminism, psychoanalysis, postmodern fiction and ethnic literature. She has published several scholarly articles on the novels of Angela Carter and Toni Morrison in Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities ( 中山人文學報), Review of English and American Literature (英美 文學評論), Chung-wai Literary Monthly (中外文學), NTU Studies in Language and Literature and EurAmerica ( 歐美研究季刊). Email: [email protected]

[Received 11 Sept. 2009; 28 Jan. 2010 accepted; revised 22 Feb. 2010]