|
Reading at the
cultural interface: the corn symbolism of 'Beloved.
by Wendy Harding , Jacky Martin
If the borders defining American literary studies have been redrawn
over the past two decades to include works representative of a
plurality of races, genders, classes, and ethnicities, the theoretical
issues involved in reading the newly emergent texts are still in the
process of being articulated.(1) The new American literature is being
read in a variety of ways, not all of which do justice to its rich
multiplicity. Critical methods developed in former years to demonstrate
the homogeneity of America letters are still practiced, with the result
that the differences of new texts are sometimes overlooked in the
interest of emphasizing their universal features. More promising are
alternative approaches that address not only the textual diversity of
the revised American canon but also the multiplicity within individual
texts.(2) Taking a passage from Toni Morrison's Beloved as our example,
this essay will present a concept and a practice that endeavor to
respond to the text's complexity.(3)
Morrison's novels have been characterized by both admirers and
detractors as eccentric, enigmatic, mysterious, or indeterminate. While
she admits in interviews to being fascinated by problems without
resolutions (fate 130), Morrison also expresses a longing for
comprehension from her audience. In 1981 she complained, "I have yet to
read criticism that understands my work or is prepared to understand
it. I don't care if the critic likes or dislikes it. I would just like
to feel less isolated" (LeClair 29). The writer's desire for
comprehension and the perplexity of some readers indicate a block in
the reading process which we intend to investigate. Some of Beloved's
early reviewers read Morrison from the dominant perspective, producing
uncomprehending or hostile evaluations. In this view both the subject
and style of the novel represent a serious lapse in taste.(4) These
evaluations generally refuse close textual analysis and offer reductive
summaries of events. Yet even by critics who read more attentively and
sympathetically, Morrison's art is often mistaken for something more
conventional. We will sketch out the problem empirically by examining
the passage in which Sethe and Paul D, having just made love for the
first time, think back to their earliest sexual experiences at Sweet
Home. This passage, which we quote here in its entirety, centers on the
cornfield where Sethe and Halle make love for the first time:
Sethe made a dress on the sly and Halle hung his hitching rope from a
nail on
the wall of her cabin. And there on top of a mattress on top of the
dirt
floor of the cabin they coupled for the third time, the first two
having
been in the tiny cornfield Mr. Garner kept because it was a crop
animals
could use as well as humans. Both Halle and Sethe were under the
impression
that they were hidden. Scrunched down among the stalks they couldn't
see
anything, including the corn tops waving over their heads and visible
to
everyone else.
Sethe smiled at her and Halle's stupidity. Even the crows knew and came
to look. Uncrossing her ankles, she managed not to laugh aloud.
The jump, thought Paul D, from a calf to a girl wasn't all that mighty.
Not the leap Halle believed it would be. And taking her in the corn
rather
than her quarters, a yard away from the cabins of the others who had
lost
out, was a gesture of tenderness. Halle wanted privacy for her and got
a
public display. Who could miss a ripple in a cornfield on a quiet
cloudless
day? He, Sixo and both of the Pauls sat under Brother pouring water
from a
gourd over their heads, and through eyes streaming with well water,
they
watched the confusion of tassels in the field below. It had been hard,
hard
sitting there erect as dogs, watching corn stalks dance at noon. The
water
running over their heads made it worse.
Paul D sighed and fumed over. Sethe took the opportunity afforded by
his
movement to shift as well. Looking at Paul D's back, she remembered
that
some of the corn stalks broke, folded down over Halle's back, and among
the
things her fingers clutched were husk and cornsilk hair.
How loose the silk. How jailed down the juice.
The jealous admiration of the men watching melted with the feast of new
corn they allowed themselves that night. Plucked from the broken stalks
that
Mr. Gamer could not doubt was the fault of the racoon. Paul F wanted
his
roasted; Paul A wanted his boiled and now Paul D couldn't remember how
finally they'd cooked those ears too young to eat. What he did remember
was
parting the hair to get to the tip, the edge of his fingernail just
under,
so as not to graze a single kernel.
The pulling down of the tight sheath, the ripping sound always
convinced
her it hurt.
As soon as one strip of husk was down, the rest obeyed and the ear
yielded up to him its shy rows, exposed at last. How loose the silk.
How
quick the jailed-up flavor ran free.
No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no
accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you.
How loose the silk. How fine and loose and free.(26-27)
At first reading, this passage seems to offer a satisfying conclusion
to an unsatisfactory love scene. For the men rejected when Sethe
chooses Halle, the feast of corn apparently assuages the frustration
and exclusion they have experienced in observing the two lovers. For
the couple lying in bed at 124 Bluestone Road, the interlaced
recollection of the past seems to resolve differences, to bring them
from rejection to mutual acceptance, from separation to togetherness.
But while the phrases that conclude this section of the narrative
suggests convergence, other elements reinforce the separateness and
ambivalence of Paul D,s and Sethe's past and present experience.
Our initial impression of harmonious resolution results from our
sifting out signs that counter the positive values of some of the words
and symbols. In fact, conventional models of interpretation encourage
us to ignore or reconcile contradictory signs. As long as we construe
the critic's role as the solution of problems raised in the text, we
seek to unify our impressions and thereby reduce its complexity. To
illustrate our point, we shall consider the ways in which various modes
of criticism have accounted or might account for this passage, and,
subsequently, we will offer an alternative critical approach that we
define as criticism at the interface.
Most problematic among current critical approaches is the practice of
judging a work according to conventional patterns derived from Western
models. From this perspective literature of quality reasserts schemata
held to be "universal"; consequently, departures from these patterns
are treated as local and inessential variations on timeless themes. To
be sure, few readers of Morrison apply this approach to her work
deliberately; instead, they unwittingly misread Morrison's symbols as
familiar tropes. For example, David Lawrence interprets the passage
from Beloved as an example of "psychic union" between two people who
are united sexually: "They silently recall, in tandem, the safe memory
of love at Sweet Home. Morrison's narrator creates seamless transitions
between their separate but simultaneous memories of Sethe and Halle's
lovemaking in the cornfield. The recollection culminates in the shared
trope for sexual arousal and fulfillment expressed in the husked corn"
(Lawrence 194). Lawrence arrives at this interpretation by mistaking
Morrison's narrative for a more conventional work. To be sure, the
preliminary encounter between Sethe and Paul D seems to be building
toward a satisfying climax. The narrator heightens expectations in
representing Paul D's heated imagining of the long anticipated
love-making "Merely kissing the wrought iron on her back had shook the
house, had made it necessary for him to beat it to pieces. Now he would
do more" (20). Yet only by forgetting the subsequent disappointment and
disjunction between the two characters can the corn be made into an
emblem of sexual communion between Sethe and Paul D. The corn is
obviously a highly erotic image, but it is made into a symbol of
harmony and closure only through an extremely selective reading.(5)
As an alternative to traditional uniformizing habits of reading we
could look to approaches based on the recognition of dichotomies in
cultural productions. The more politically sympathetic view of classic
Marxist criticism would still tend to reduce the complexity of the
Morrisonian text. In this view, the resistance of dominated groups is
pre-defined by the ruling class so that any expression of difference
merely contributes to justifying the underdogs's subordinate status.(6)
The minority writer has the possibility only of fictionalizing the very
terms in which the dominant class wants minorities to see themselves.
Maggie Sale offers a powerful reply to these kinds of approaches when
she distinguishes in Beloved a distinctively Black aesthetics. Sale
reads the passage we are studying as an example of repetition and
improvisation characteristic of the blues. Morrison's novel represents
a new form "in which a politically informed, multivocal discourse
values innovation and difference rather than continuity and similarity"
(Sale 49). Sale's approach illustrates that the African American writer
is not doomed to replicate the forms of the dominant race, but her
vision of call and response, of multivocality and difference, and of
African American blues harmonies in Beloved, though extremely subtle,
still tends to smooth over the disruptions and dissonances in the text.
On closer inspection, the music of the passage we are studying is
created from unreconciled differences between the characters that are
not fully addressed in the call and response model.
In feminist criticism we find ways of reading designed to address
divisions and conflicts within texts. Responsive to unconventional
literature produced in a context of marginality, feminist readings
constitute a significant part of the already quite substantial critical
corpus on Beloved. Yet in privileging the female side of the gender
division, the feminist perspective reveals blind spots of its own.
Satya Mohanty's reading of this passage interprets the couple's "fused
memory" of the corn silk and the juice as a shared "concern for the
moral implications of being enslaved and being free" (Mohanty 58-59).
Yet in Mohanty's reading the problems posed in the novel are resolved
simply by the re-education of the male. Paul D must learn to understand
"the historical achievement of black motherhood" and his "historical
indebtedness" (Mohanty 65-66). Though this may be one of the obstacles
to a harmonious resolution of conflict, it is by no means the only one.
In founding critical evaluation on
a single code of reference, each of the critical paradigms outlined so
far inevitably produces distortions and omissions. Determinants such as
gender, race, class or ethnicity, although correctly explained in
isolation, are not properly accounted for in situations when they
interact with one another. Indeed, the place where cultural
determinants overlap is a site of dense complexity, as Morrison has
clearly demonstrated in her reading of Moby Dick as the "unspoken"
response to the Black presence in American society, the moment "when
whiteness became ideology" (Morrison "Unspeakable," 15). She discovers
in this canonical text what she calls "the ghost in the machine"
("Unspeakable," 11), evidence of the shaping presence of Afro-Americans
in American culture.(7) We intend to reverse this reading strategy and
extend it to Morrison's work. In this perspective, Sethe's and Paul D's
interlaced memory of the cornfield would respond both to the
dehumanizing pressure of the institution of slavery and the necessity
(for slave and ex-slave alike) to assert humanity. The resulting icon
of the husk of corn is not a construction that masks contradiction like
the white whale but one that emphasizes it. Rather than subsuming
complexity in unity, Morrison's symbolism reveals ambivalence in
multiplicity. In the cases of Melville's and Morrison's work, although
in opposite ways, an ambivalent construction that we call an
"interface" has been created between cultures in conflict.
The interface is the privileged site of observation for the critic for
several reasons:
1) Divisions in culture are never simply dichotomous. Only through a
reduction of their complexity can they be made to fit the dualistic
categories of the dominant or the restricted political angle of the
dominated. In fact culture's multiple divisions result in a complexity
of intersections. Consequently, we want to eschew monistic approaches
in order to discover a plurality of cultural references. From a binary
perspective, corn is dichotomized into the edible and the non edible,
the cob and the husk. The cob is endowed with value and the husk is
rejected. By contrast, in Morrison's text, both are given significance,
and each is seen in association to the other. The corn symbol expresses
a cluster of ambivalent positions:(8) freedom and confinement
("loose...silk"..."tight sheath"..."the jailed up flavor ran free"); up
and down ("jailed down juice"..."jailed up flavor"); integrity and
rupture ("corn stalks dance"..."corns stalks broke"); as well as a kind
of polymorphous sexuality that goes beyond binary divisions ("the
pulling down of the tight sheath, the ripping sound always convinced
her it hurt"..."the ear yielded up to him its shy rows").
On consideration, we realize that for both Sethe and Paul D the corn
symbol mediates not only satisfaction but also deprivation both in the
remembered past and in the present act of remembering. In the
remembered scene we discover contradictions in the couple's experience.
Each of them is visible and yet not visible at the same time: Sethe is
hiding yet watched by the men whose attention she wants to avoid; Paul
D's desire is obvious (the men are "erect as dogs"), yet he is
unnoticed by Sethe. Each is satisfied and yet deprived: Sethe enjoys
the sex but not the corn; Paul D has the corn but not the sex. In the
present, although Paul D and Sethe appear to achieve some kind of
fusion, in fact their remembering of the experience is distinct. The
apparent harmony of the passage results as much from the couple's
shared ambivalence as from their shared experience. The parallel
courses of the couple's remembering do not merge, as we might expect,
with the "he" or "she" converging on the plural pronoun "we" or "they";
instead, in the last line of the passage the associative pronoun "you"
invites the reader to participate in the ambivalence of the experience.
2) Resulting from interferences
between social divisions and representing the consequent interactions,
the interface is a place where signification is concentrated. Symbols
have the importance accorded dreams or totems in Freud's analysis of
dream and joke work, yet a vital distinction has to be made. This
concentration of signification does not serve to conceal inadmissible
evidences accessible only through the process of analysis as in the
Freudian system; on the contrary it juxtaposes glaring evidences to
zones of mystery and complexity. The satisfactoriness of the corn is at
the same time almost obscenely obvious and obscure: "No matter what all
your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the
way that simple joy could shake you" (27). On the one hand, the
narrative gives the impression that consummation is fundamental to the
scene, yet, on the other hand, we find that "now Paul D couldn't
remember how finally they'd cooked those ears too young to eat" (27).
Moreover, Paul D's memory block induces a feeling of satisfaction
rather than malaise. Instead of signalling the Freudian process of
secondary elaboration, it points to a temporary omission of disquieting
elements present in the scene. This truncated memory is not a scrambled
version of the underlying truth like the dream; rather it is the only
truth Paul D can accommodate at this moment in the narrative. In
contrast to Freudian symbolism, the corn is not a dissimulating symbol,
but an intense source of signification in which both the lure and the
reality it is supposed to conceal are to be considered simultaneously.
3) At the cultural interface groups are seen in an affronted state
defending acquired ground and thus exposing their beliefs and their
weaknesses. In mainstream literary productions the interface zone
reveals the erasures and distortions which underpin the contradictions
of dominant discourse. Conversely, at the interface minority cultures
are revealed asserting their values in response to external pressures.
In that perspective, Afro-American signifying answers white American
claims to universality,(9) and the "double vision" attributed to Black
Americans by Du Bois exactly matches the cultural monovision of the
whites. In the minority text, the interface records transgressive or
contaminative processes, one culture not just conflicting but
overlapping with the other. Although the dominant symbolism is resorted
to, it is reappropriated and displaced from its original context of
exploitation. The reference to crows and to the racoon gives to this
passage its particular double-edged humor, mocking at once the system
and those submitted to the system. The reference to obvious racist
stereotypes is at the same time interiorized and distanced when
attributed to the whites ("that Mr. Garner could not doubt was the
fault of the racoons") or used by the dominated in possible reference
to themselves ("Even the crows knew and came to look").
The context of slavery has also been appropriated as an ambivalent
symbol. Clearly, the cornfield in which Sethe and Halle make love
remains the property of Mr. Garner, designated by him as "a crop
animals could use as well as humans" (26). In their attempt to escape
the cramped quarters alloted to them as slaves, the couple still cannot
avoid the space of slavery or the pressure of its discourse. They find
themselves in a similarly circumscribed situation, but they are, in
addition, exposed to visibility expressed ambivalently as both
integration in nature ("a ripple in a cornfield") and potential
exposure to unwanted attention ("Even the crows knew and came to
look"). The dichotomies of the whites have been reconverted and
readdressed in a symbolism that straddles the contradictions of
injustice and converts them into cultural complexity.
4) Finally, the interface does not coincide with boundaries between
separate and opposed systems of values; it is the place where culture
is produced in the friction between affronted groups. In her creation
of the corn scene, far from simply evincing reversed, redressed, or
marginal symbolism, Morrison both cites and challenges Western culture
in order to propose new, surprisingly enriched cultural values such as
the combination of contradictory qualities that we have already
analyzed in the symbol of the corn. The restricted perspectives of the
two groups of characters in the remembered scene and the two
remembering characters are combined by the narrator who transforms the
binarism of the dominant perspective into multivalent symbolism and
thereby relays a new system of values. Morrison's artistic innovation
is illustrated in the diagram below which attempts to demonstrate the
multivalence of the corn symbol.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
What we saw earlier as a cluster of dualities now appears more as a
complex of interconnected, overlapping positions expressed through the
relationship of stalks, husk, silk, kernels, corn tops, and juice. The
multiple desires of the subjects involved are projected onto an object
that is characterized by its many-layered, imbricated structure.
Replete with a multi-layered signification as it is, the Morrisonian
interface simulates the violence of conflicts and the forces of
resistance which underpin it. Our contribution so far has been to
reclaim that crypted seat of signification from partial recognition and
to formulate principles to ensure its readability. We have shown that
the narrative connects the slaves's distinctive experiences in the
shared icon of the corn; the ambivalence of the symbol permits it to
express both entrapment in the system and resistance to it. But the
interfarial symbol should not be considered as merely an isolated or
local site of meaning dealing with a particular moment of interference
in the values of dominant and dominated. The symbolism of the interface
also involves a form of narrative development unrecognized by the
sequential, problem-solving model conventionally applied to texts.
In reading Morrison, we have also to take into account the syntagmatic
dimension of her symbolism.(10) The narrative will return to the
cornfield and to the corn symbol, multiplying and complexifying this
initial ambivalence. So we discover at the end of Beloved that the
Sweet Home slaves center their plan to run on the cornfield, agreeing
to leave "when the corn is tall" (222) and to meet in the cornfield.
For some of them the cornfield will be the place of escape, for others,
the point where the whites redouble the repression. In this context,
the corn image permits a stroke of double-edged irony as the white men
attempt to roast the rebellious Sixo over a fire that is "only enough
for cooking hominy" (226). When schoolteacher comes to claim Sethe and
her children in Cincinnati, the narrative returns again to the
cornfield, creating a further complexification in the development of
the symbol. Although the potential strife caused by Sethe's marriage
may have seemed resolved in the feast of corn at Sweet Home, discord
returns the morning after the feast at Bluestone Road celebrating her
escape from slavery. Where the first celebration takes place in the
space circumscribed by slavery, the second is held in the supposedly
free space of the North. Bluestone Road seems a place of miraculous
plenty where ninety can be fed from the vegetable garden where Baby
Suggs had planted corn and there is still some left over "Much as
they'd picked for the party, there were still ears ripening, which she
could see from where she stood" (138). This spontaneous celebration of
Sethe's freedom oversteps the balance of the earlier feast and in the
associative logics of the narrative brings on the return of
schoolteacher and the incursion of the bloody institution of slavery on
the free side of the Ohio River. With the arrival of schoolteacher, we
find a renewal of the problem of thinking one's actions in terms other
than those of the dominant discourse. Schoolteacher predictably
constructs a conventional narrative, explaining Sethe's actions in the
logic of premise and conclusion, cause and effect: "Now she'd gone wild
due to the mishandling of the nephew who'd overbeat her and made her
cut and run" (149). Initially Stamp Paid (159) and Paul D (164) judge
Sethe's actions in similar terms. Subsequently, they become reconciled
to her through symbols which link Sethe's bloody act to their own
histories: Stamp Paid's red ribbon, Vashti's black ribbon, and Paul D's
Red Heart. The symbolism develops in an open-ended process that allows
the possibility of further amplification through association, either in
future narrative developments or in the contribution of experiences
that readers bring to the text.
In
fact Morrison's narrative develops according to two distinct dynamics.
The symbolic dimension parallels, supplements and sometimes takes over
from logical narrative progressions. Hence, according to the pattern of
problem and resolution, Sethe is excluded from and finally reintegrated
into the community, but her reacceptance is accomplished by symbolic
"means" in the Shout. In a spiralling progressive-recessive movement
characteristic of interfacial development, the Shout takes Sethe back
to the Clearing "where the voices of women searched for the sound that
broke the back of words" (261). Moreover, something is left over after
the denouement, in the form of Beloved; something is unresolved,
"disremembered and unaccounted for" (274) so that symbolism takes over
at the point where narrativity leaves off. In this sense Beloved is not
a story to pass on, that is, a story to be repeated, but an invitation
to discard the story and espouse the values at stake in the novel's
symbolism.
With the interface we
seem to be dealing with what Deleuze and Guattari describe as
rhizomatic "propagation" as opposed to traditional arborescent
structures: while the former continues to grow and expand indefinitely,
the latter only replicates an original structure (Deleuze and Guattari
Mille, 11-37). According to Deleuze and Guattari's observations in
connection with Kafka, the minority writer is "deterritorialized" and
his act of creation, the construction of a "minor literature...within a
major language" (Deleuze and Guattari Kafka, 16), becomes a means to
reterritorialize his message and the community to which he belongs. Yet
we feel that both the double system evoked in Mille Plateaux and the
concept of "a minor literature" later developed in Kafka: Toward a
Minor Literature contribute to replicating the dichotomies that we see
systematically deconstructed and denounced by Toni Morrison, as well as
other African American creative artists. We propose another tentative
metaphor. Rather than being produced against or along with the dominant
discourse, the dominated text filters or leaches through it by
surcharging the oppressors's words, deriding them by subverting their
most offensive strategies, building from them rather than ignoring or
obliterating them. Hence symbols of oppression can be overprinted with
the signs of liberation, the space of slavery can be rethought in terms
of both the corn and the cornfield, and all the intermediary symbols
that are often reduced to binary dualities can be reinstated in their
full complexity.
Our analysis of
Morrison suggests that what might initially be perceived as a rhizome
is more fruitfully considered as an interaction which could be
represented by the image of a parasitic vine, which like ivy supports
itself on another plant that it devitalizes in order to thrive. Rather
than identifying the interface with a dialectical process of
confrontation or conciliation between two hostile and fundamentally
distinct cultural systems, the "parasitic" principle would describe a
process of mutual and conflicting occupation of one common cultural
field going through constant cycles of flux and mutation. Thus, a
clearcut distinction would be established between the political power
game and the more fluid, more intricate and unaccountable world of
ideological representations, restoring structural autonomy in
complementarily to both planes. Although we are still very far from
being able to articulate validly the two planes, it seems clear that we
are shifting, at least as far as ideological representations are
concerned, from dualistic structures like the Freudian or Marxist
systems to more hybrid structures of mututal contamination in which
already produced discourses serve as substrata for new discourses's
proliferation. The general orientation would be toward increased
complexification and expansion rather than toward harmonization and
unification. The underlying dynamic principle would be synergetic
rather than agonistic, interferential rather than dichotomous,
multiplicative rather than reductive. The critic's function would have
to be defined accordingly: instead of devising and revising hierarchies
according to relatively immovable values, that is homogeneizing the
complexity of literary phenomena, we would be custodians of the
literary complexity of our cultures, attentive to both continuities and
discontinuities, to new departures and enduring conflicts.
Notes
(1.) See for example Newman's description of the changes that have
occurred in the American literary canon during the past two decades
(Newman 104-13).
(2.) An example
of a theory responding to the plurality within texts is Gates's concept
of Signifyin(g), which acknowledges both the repetition of Western
rhetorical structures in Black literature and the transforming African
American difference. In an extended theoretical development of W.E.B.
Du Bois's memorable description of Negro identity, Gates speaks of the
"two-toned" or "double voiced" black text (Gates 1984, 3).
(3.) For a further exploration of our intercultural approach, see our
forthcoming study, A World of Difference: An Intercultural Reading of
Toni Morrison's Novels, to be published by Greenwood Press.
(4.) Stanley Crouch's 1987 article is representative of this
unsympathetic approach.
(5.) Even extremely subtle critics seek resolution in this scene.
Deborah Sitter takes into account some of the differences between Sethe
and Paul D but reads this particular passage as a prefigurement of the
novel's conclusion where the couple will place their stories side by
side: "The sexual frustration Sethe and Paul D experience at the outset
of the bedroom scene is eventually transformed into sexual fulfillment.
What prevents them at first and enables them at last is conveyed
indirectly through the multivocal, multilayered, dense verbal texture
of Morrison's style" (Sitter 27).
(6.) "Le minoritaire se trouve en fait integre dans le systeme
symbolique defini par le majoritaire quels que soient par ailleurs ses
essais ou ses echecs a se constituer un systeme propre. Plus encore,
ses efforts pour se definir un tel systeme sont orientes et canalises
par le majoritaire; il ne peut se definir sur des references internee
et independantes, il doit le faire a partir des references que lui
offre le systeme majoritaire" (Guillaumin 90). [Minorities are in fact
part of the symbolic system defined by the majority in spite of their
attempts or strategies to create their own system. Furthermore, their
efforts to define such a system are directed and channeled by the
majority; they cannot define themselves according to internal and
independent references, they must do so on the basis of references
available within the majority system (our translation).]
(7.) The approach to "mainstream" literature suggested in this 1989
article is developed at much greater length in Morrison's book Playing
in the Dark.
(8.) In the absence
of a positively connoted word expressing dual or multiple meaning we
are forced to settle for the term ambivalent, although we are not
completely satisfied with it. The English language betrays a bias
against the possibility of a statement expressing more than one meaning
at a time. To identify a statement as ambivalent, ambiguous, or
equivocal is to judge it as a failed or devious attempt at
communication.
(9.) Signifying--a
concept whose complexity does not permit any more than a brief
reference within the confines of this article--has been discussed as a
linguistic practice (Kochman 336 45), as a literary typology (Ostendorf
158 60) and as a principle of Afro-American literary history (Gates).
(10.) We refer to this process in our article "Subjective Correlatives
as Correlations of Subjection in Toni Morrison's Fiction" (Harding and
Martin 109-10) and discuss it at greater length in our forthcoming
book.
Works Cited
Crouch, Stanley. "Aunt Medea (Rev. of Beloved)." The New Republic
(October 19, 1987): 38-43.
Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. Mille Plateaux. Paris: Minuit, 1980.
(English translation: A Thousand Plateaux. London: Athlone, 1987.)
--.
Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. by Dana Polan. Theory and
History of Literature. Vol. 30. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1986.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. "Criticism in the Jungle." In Black Literature
and Literary Theory. Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York Methuen,
1984. 1-24.
--. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afrro American Literary
Criticism. New York: Oxford U P, 1988.
Guillaumin, Colette. L'ideologie raciste: genese et langage actuel.
Paris: Mouton, 1972.
Harding, Wendy, and Martin, Jacky. "Subjective Correlatives as
Correlations of Subjection in Toni Morrison's Fiction." Profils
Americains 2 (1992): 103-11.
Kochman, Thomas. "Towards an Ethnography of Black American Speech
Behavior." In Afro-American Anthropology. Ed. by Norman Whitten and
John Szwed. New York, 1970.
Lawrence, David. "Fleshly Ghosts and Ghostly Flesh: The Word and the
Body in Beloved." Studies in American Fiction 19 (Autumn 1991):
189-201.
LeClair, Thomas. "'The Language Must Not Sweat': A conversation with
Toni Morrison." The New Republic (21 March 1981): 25-29.
Mohanty, Satya P. "The Epistemic Status of Cultural Identity: On
Beloved and the Postcolonial Condition." Cultural Critique (Spring
1993): 41-80.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987.
--. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and thee Literary Imagination.
Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1992.
--.
"Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro American Presence in American
Literature." Michigan Quarterly Review 28 (Winter 1989):1-34.
Newman, Katherine. "MELUS Invented: The Rest is History." MELUS 16.4
(Winter 1989-90): 99-113.
Ostendorf, Berndt. Black Literature in White America. Studies in
Contemporary Literature and Culture. Brighton: Harvester P, 1982.
Sale, Maggie. "Call and Response as Critical Method: African-American
Oral Traditions and Beloved." African American Review 26 (Spring 1992):
41-50.
Sitter, Deborah Ayer. "The Making of a Man: Dialogic Meaning in
Beloved." African American Review 26 (Spring 1992): 17-29.
Tate, Claudia. "Toni Morrison." Black Women Writers at Work. New York:
Continuum, 1983. 117-31.
-1-
|
|