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Missing peace in Toni
Morrison's 'Sula' and 'Beloved.
by Rachel Lee
From her earliest fictional work The Bluest Eye (1970) to her latest,
Jazz (1992), Toni Morrison cultivates an aesthetic of ambiguity.
Placing Morrison in a "postmodernist" context, Robert Grant, for
instance, describes both the "labor" of interpreting Sula and the
richness evoked by its narrative "gaps." Clearly, Morrison's emphasis
on absences and indeterminate meanings casts an interpretational bone
in the direction of readers and critics who, as urged by Grant,
transform "absence into presence." However, I would argue that the more
productive endeavor may be to read the ambiguities of Morrison's texts
not as aporia to be "filled . . . by the reader" (Grant 94) but as
signifiers of an unattainable desire for stable definitions and
identities.
This essay,
accordingly, explores the relationship between the slippage of words
and the informing voids (desires) of Morrison's novels by examining two
of her most critically recognized works, Sula (1973) and Beloved
(1987). Though all of Morrison's novels play upon the variability of
language, Sula especially throws into disequilibrium that exemplar
dichotomy, good and evil, and by extension all Manichean systems which
undergird traditional linguistic and ethical orders. By bringing to
light the relativity of meaning, Sula broaches the subject not only of
semantic integrity (how we can convey what we mean) but also of
epistemological integrity (how can we know anything since there is no
objective perspective and no objective essence or truth to know). While
the aforementioned questions bristle under each of Morrison's texts, in
Sula, Morrison offers to her readers a main character who telescopes
that scandal of epistemology. How can we understand or know Sula, who
is not only egoless or without a self (and hence undeterminable) but
who also is unable to know anything herself?
By contrast, Beloved, set almost a century earlier (c. 1852-1873),
deals less with the metaphysical premises of good and evil to focus
instead upon the institution of slavery and its overwhelming perversion
of meaning. Inspired by a newspaper clipping from the 1850s (Davis
151), Beloved reconstructs the nuances of a black woman's killing of
her infant daughter in response to the Fugitive Slave Act. Symbolic and
discursive substitutions become emblematic in this latter narrative,
where a ghost stands in for the lost living, where memory only
approximates event, and where gestures and words struggle to fill the
gaps of unvoiced longings. In Beloved, Morrison again highlights the
variability of meaning and identity, yet in this case she links
approximations of meaning to the historical condition of being
enslaved.
Taking the cue from
Eva's suggestion that there are no such things as innocent words or
gestures- "'How you gone not mean something by it'" (Sula 68)- I engage
in close readings of Morrison's texts with an eye toward the
overdeter-mined nature of each sign. In addition, by looking at two of
her works in conjunction, I hope to shed light on the different levels
of language manipulation occurring in each book as well as conjecture
the possible implications of these differences. How do the words of
1987 supplement, qualify, or reinforce their 1973 predecessors?
Sula begins with two gestures: a dedication and an epigraph. In the
dedication, Morrison reconfigures a traditional signifier of loss and
elegiac retrieval, to one of desire: "It is sheer good fortune to miss
somebody long before they leave you. This book is for Ford and Slade,
whom I miss although they have not left me." Instead of invoking the
dead, Morrison places "Ford and Slade" into a "missed" situation,
rewriting their future absence into the present and applying
associations of loss and profound appreciation (usually reserved for
the dead) to persons not yet defined by this absence. In effect,
Morrison conveys a heightened sense of the variability of Ford and
Slade, their probable mortality, their easy slippage into alter
identities. How does the writer, then, who in essence "embalms" or
fixes her subject, inscribe this changeableness of character? Does not
every descriptive endeavor risk "missing" an essential, uncapturable
quality (hence Morrison's play on the other meanings of to miss: 'to
not quite capture,' 'to arrive too late,' 'to render inaccurately'- as
in missing a piece, missing a train, or missing the point). With this
dedication, Morrison unsettles the very sense of to miss and intimates
the impossibility of any representation not informed by missing
meanings.
The second sign in Sula,
the epigraph drawn from Williams's The Rose Tattoo, foreshadows the
replication of signs, the overdetermination of meanings, and the
thematics of self in the subsequent text:
Nobody knew my rose of the world but me. . . . I had too much glory.
They don't want glory like that in nobody's heart.
The Rose Tattoo inscribes its sign upon Morrison's novel, not unlike
the birthmark destined for Sula's eye. This birthmark remains an
ambiguous sign variously esteemed; it appears "a rose" to the narrative
voice, a stemmed rose to Eva and Nel, a "scary black thing" to Nel's
children, "a copperhead" to Jude, "Hannah's ashes" to the community,
and "a tadpole" to Shadrack. As a mark of and on Sula/Sula, the
epigraph foreshadows Sula's final isolation and incomprehensibility. At
her death, nobody "knows" Sula but herself. The epigraph also
attributes to the eponymous protagonist an excess of self-centeredness.
The words "I had too much glory" find a near correlative in Sula's
later assertionn "'I can do it all, why can't I have it all?'" (142).
Yet, this epigraphic suggestion of Sula's self-love enacts a further
corruption of signs, for Morrison later suggests that Sula has no sense
of self- "She had no center . . . no ego" (119). Both Rose Tattoos
(birthmark and epigraph) become for Sula/Sula symbols of contradictory
meanings as well as marks of "missed" identification.
With those dedicatory and epigraphic signs, one enters the narrative
body of Sula, where missed meanings between conversants proliferate.
After Sula's return to Medallion, she and Nel engage in familiar yet
unfamiliar banter:
"You been gone
too long, Sula." "Not too long, but maybe too far." "What's that
supposed to mean?" . . . "Oh, I don't know." "Want some cool tea?" (96)
While the reader may variously
interpret Sula's suggestion that she has gone "too far" (i.e., she has
reached a different value system, or has overstepped consensus
boundaries), Nel doesn't conjecture these meanings.
Rather, the conversation turns to the distancing etiquette of proffered
"tea." Nel's puzzlement over what Sula "mean[s]" is, in itself, an
oddity, for the two women's history has been marked by an uncanny
unison of thinking and movement that does not require words. Most
memorable of that synchronicity is the prelude to Chicken Little's
death, where the two girls "in concert, without ever meeting each
other's eyes" dig two holes in the ground, furrowing deeper and deeper"
until the two holes were one and the same," finally "replac[ing] the
soil and cover[ing] the entire grave with uprooted grass [all during
which] neither one had spoken a word" (58-59). This ensemble
performance significantly occurs in silence, the implications being
that words would disrupt the unity of action and, correlatively, that
the necessity for words indicates a lesser degree of intimacy. Imbedded
in the textual appeal to wordlessness, then, is the notion of language
as the site and symptom of difference. Thus, when Nel recalls her
former closeness with Sula, she describes them as "two throats and one
eye" (147), emphasizing both perceptual "sameness" and discursive
"difference." That is, even during the period in which the two girls
shared "one eye," their means of articulating themselves were
differentiated as "two."
In
addition to the slips in language occurring between speakers, Morrison
shows the schism between word and delayed/deferred significance that
transpires within an individual's mind. When Eva describes her reasons
for killing Plum, she speaks "with two voices. Like two people were
talking at the same time, saying the same thing, one a fraction of a
second behind the other" (71). The two voices say the "same thing"- but
with a difference, one articulating, for Hannah, Plum's decline and
Eva's response to it; the other translating for Eva, herself, the same
scenario but with all the unsaid qualifications of motive and
recollected vividness which encompass that "fraction of a second"
delay. The "ambiguities of mercy " (Spillers 314), intoned but not made
explicit in either Eva's act or her subsequent explanation, suggest
that the "two voices" have not adequately justified her killing of
Plum; perhaps the clarification required to assess Eva's act as a mercy
killing or not lies in the reserve of that delayed moment- in the
missing or sublimated text.
Contending with language's slippage presents a dilemma not only for
Morrison's characters, but also for the author/narrator. For instance,
the words "pig meat" (50) remain inadequate to describe the flavor of
Ajax's utterance, the implicit "compliment" of his stylized delivery.
The significance of pig meat lies less in the literal content of the
term than in
the way [Ajax]
handled the words. When he said "hell" he hit the h with his lungs and
the impact was greater than the achievement of the most imaginative
foul mouth in the town. He could say "shit" with a nastiness impossible
to imitate. So, when he said "pig meat" as Nel and Sula passed, they
guarded their eyes lest someone see their delight. (50)
This qualification acknowledges the distance between the words at the
writer's disposal and the nuances conveyed in the hissing of a
particular h. While Morrison elaborates on the h's transformative
effects on the word hell, she leaves absent how Ajax utters pig meat to
give it a complimentary texture; like shit it remains "impossible to
imitate." Thus, despite the supplement that Morrison provides, pig meat
as Ajax delivers it, remains missing from the text, only associatively
colored by the description of Ajax's hissing hell.
Through such proximal associations, Morrison manages to absent the
utterance and, though such absence, deliver the sense. That is, Ajax
says aloud what was "in all their minds" yet difficult or prohibitive
to express (e.g., "the taste of young sweat on tight skin," or the
"mystery curled' beneath "cream-colored trousers" [50]). The emphasis
on the way in which Ajax mouths the words subordinates their
referential function to highlight instead the process of meaning's
construction. More important than the referent of "pig meat" is the
utterance's capacity to inspire for the men in front of the pool hall
and for the two walking girls a breeze of sexual (re)awakening.
Moreover, the very slips and deviances in both Ajax's intonation and
Morrison's description of it provide a stylistic correlative to Sula's
and Nel's burgeoning sense of sexuality: They were "like tightrope
walkers, as thrilled by the possibility of a slip as by the maintenance
of tension and balance" (51). The playfulness in both Ajax's and
Morrison's words simultaneously create and avoid the desire for sexual
and semantic gratification.
The
absence of Ajax's "pig meat" utterance, yet its evocation through
supplemental conceit, reveals its simultaneous properties as both
missed yet not missing from the narrative. This liminal straddling
between absence and presence becomes characteristic of the metonymic
device which Morrison shows operating for herself as well as her
characters. For instance, Jude's tie and Ajax's license evolve into
metonyms for persons with whom they are associated. For Nel, Jude's tie
becomes both the sign of his absence and the single remnant of all that
he took: ". . . you walked past me saying, 'I'll be back for my
things.' And you did but you left your tie" (106). Jude's tie remains
liminally situated, as a signifier of absence, only through being
present and metaphorically bringing into presence the remembered Jude.
It would seem that Ajax's license would likewise provide Sula with a
"tie" to her former lover; however, in this instance, Morrison reflects
on the relevance of linguistic error to one's sense of knowing. As Sula
searches for signs of Ajax's former presence, she eventually stumbles
across physical evidence, which ironically negates Ajax's identity as
Sula knows it:
Then one day . . .
she found . . . proof that he had been there, his driver's license. . .
. But what was this? Albert Jacks? His name was Albert Jacks? A. Jacks.
She had thought it was Ajax. . . . when for the first time in her life
she had lain in bed with a man and said his name involuntarily or said
it truly meaning him, the name she was screaming and saying was not his
at all. (135-36)
Although she
truly "means him," Sula misses saying Albert Jacks's name with its
inscribed difference. This mistake leads Sula to question her knowledge
in general: "'. . . there is nothing I did know and I have known
nothing since the one thing I wanted was to know his name . . .'"
(136). Her conclusion on knowing nothing applies beyond herself- how
can anyone know anything when the purveyors of meaning slip, deviate,
and deceive?
A correlative
question- How can anyone convey anything when words limit and elude?-
bristles under Morrison's text. Instead of released verbal expression,
Morrison often presents only the gestures toward possible expressions:
The body must move and throw itself about, the eyes must roll, the
hands should have no peace, and the throat should release all the
yearning, despair and outrage that accompany the stupidity of loss.
(107; italics added)
The
imperative thrust of must declines into its subjunctive should, a
pattern which defers mandatory urgency. Desire and purpose replace
definitive action, as Morrison thwarts her character's attempt to
"release all yearning": "Nel waited . . . for the oldest cry . . . her
very own howl. But it did not come" (108).
The inadequacy of words and the desire for meaningful expression infuse
Morrison's novel. Yet Sula's statement on "know[ing] nothing" presents
an even graver problem. In the silence of one's interior consciousness,
meaning becomes variable or meaningless- knowledge a mere ruse.
Variability of meaning, whether articulated or silent, derives from a
relativity of perspective. If one could stabilize for a moment the
relational connotations of the word bottom, one could not fix the
variable viewpoint from which it refers. That is, the Bottom remains
"'high up for us,' said the master, 'but when God looks down, it's the
bottom. That's why we call it so. It's the bottom of heaven- best land
there is'" (5). The white farmer argues from God's "viewpoint" not
because he deems it right, but because it allows him to swindle his
black slave out of valley or "bottom" land. However, genuine investment
in God's point of view informs Eva's judgments of right and wrong as
well as communal assessments of good and evil. It remains for Sula to
question that fundamental reliance upon God's authority, bringing into
focus the implied perspective from which consensus meaning derives:
"Bible say honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long
upon the land thy God giveth thee," [says Eva].
"Mamma must have skipped that part. Her days wasn't too long,"
[responds Sula].
"Pus mouth! God's going to strike you!"
"Which God? The one watched you burn Plum?" (93)
By asking "Which God?" Sula poses the relativity of even this monolith
and questions both Eva's version of good and evil and good and evil in
general. Additionally, Sula flaunts "falling," saying "'What the hell
do I care about falling?'" since falling/Falling no longer means the
descent into evil implied in Eva's Biblical aphorism ("'Pride goeth
before a fall'") (93). Sula accepts this slippage, this fall (in
language), and opposes the community's investment in a monolithic God
as determiner of meaning.
Interestingly, while Sula here undermines God as monolith, she later
seeks an unfallen language to describe the loneliness she seeks in
coition-
a loneliness so profound
the word itself had no meaning. For loneliness assumed the absence of
other people, and the solitude she found in that desperate terrain had
never admitted the possibility of other people. (123)
Sula and Morrison seek to describe an absence that antedates presence-
a loneliness existing without relation to another. Yet language falls
short. Morrison can only approximate Sula's loneliness through a
catalog of "lost" items:
She wept
then. Tears for the deaths of the littlest things: the castaway shoes
of children; broken stems of marsh grass battered and drowned by the
sea; prom photographs of dead women she never knew; wedding rings in
pawnshop windows; the tidy bodies of Cornish hens in a nest of rice.
(123)
This list supplements the idea of loneliness-as-void, yet does not
achieve it and, paradoxically, erases it by filling it in.
Morrison later makes more explicit this loneliness defined by another
against a loneliness which is "mine." In response to Nel's implicit
condemnation of Sula's self-reliant lifestyle ("'Lonely, ain't it?'"),
Sula replies, "'Yes. But my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody
else's. . . . Ain't that something? A secondhand lonely'" (143).
Although Sula has slipped into a "secondhand lonely" for Ajax, the
loneliness she describes to Nel consists of a yearning or missing
without object. In effect, Sula wishes to describe and achieve an
Adamic loneliness, an unfallen, originary loneliness.
Sula/Sula thus exhibits a desire for absolute meaning, though only
briefly. Shortly after Nel's departure, Sula contemplates her own lack
of permanence and her correlative lack of meaning:
"If I live a hundred years my urine will flow the same way, my armpits
and breath will smell the same. . . . I didn't mean anything. I never
meant anything. I stood there watching her burn and was thrilled. I
wanted her to keep on jerking like that, to keep on dancing." (147;
italics added)
Sula describes her
unvariability (what one would think implies a stable identity), but
also her meaninglessness (perhaps confirming de Sausserian notions of
meaning's contingency upon differences [Derrida 140]). Despite this
self-evaluation, Sula, rather than meaning nothing, produces an excess
of meanings. Her words "I didn't mean anything" can be variously
interpreted: Sula cannot intend meaning since meaning and the purveyors
of meaning remain corrupt, or Sula hasn't made an impact on the world
other than being "a body, a name and an address" (173). The latter
interpretation confirms Sula as egoless or only a striving toward
identity rather than a completion or, as Deborah McDowell phrases it,
"character as process" rather than "character as essence" (81). The
context in which Sula "speaks" these thoughts compound their
overdetermination. As the last quoted words before her death, these
thoughts take on a confessional tone, especially in juxtaposition to
her recollection of Hannah's burning. Sula's "I never meant anything"
may refer to her gesture of ambivalence, of looking at Hannah's fiery
dance, feeling neither remorse nor delight. Thus, Sula reaffirms her
non-relation to another, while also denying any substantive presence
unto herself. Rather than "never mean[ing] anything," Sula's meanings
are endless, incomplete always missed.
The seeming contradiction of Sula as neither in relation to another nor
defined as present unto herself resolves itself in the notion of Sula
as open-ended or "never achiev[ing] completeness of being" (McDowell
81). That is, to pose Sula's relation to another (effectively writing
in what she desires) would be to project a closure to her identity. In
Sula, however, closure consistently eludes both author and title
character. For instance, the narrative closing of Chicken Little's
life, initially described as "the closed place in the water," quickly
transforms into "something newly missing" (61), as if closure were
always informed by some missing piece (and thus not closed or complete
at all). Chicken Little's "ending" oddly remains unseen by most of the
community; and because his remains are withheld from viewing by the
"closed coffin" (64), closure paradoxically creates a void in
perception- a new lack in the text.
Sula's death creates similar gaps in the text. Her narrative continues
beyond her last breath, and her post-mortem thoughts "'Well, I'll be
damned . . . it didn't even hurt. Wait'll I tell Nel'" (149) not only
write her beyond her own ending but also reinforce Sula's striving
after supplementation. Sula/Sula asks the reader to "wait" until a
doubtful future moment (since she is dead, she cannot tell Nel),
deferring infinitely the closure of both book and "self."
Not surprisingly, then, Sula concludes with an open-ended description
which re-emphasizes the ambiguous borders of personal and discursive
definitions. Nel's contemplation of the Peace gravestones conflates
people, words, and desires:
Together they read like a chant: PEACE 1895-1921, PEACE 1890-1923,
PEACE 1910-1940, PEACE 1892-1959.
They were not dead people. They were words. Not even words. Wishes,
longings. (171)
The associative ambiguity of "Peace" clues the reader into the thematic
suggestion that Peace, both the people and the word, remains missing
and that this missing Peace (piece) inspires desire. Morrison takes the
conventional sentiment of "rest-in-peace" out of equilibrium and
overlays grave, book, language, and identity with inconclusiveness.
Nel's final cry "'O Lord, Sula . . . girl, girl, girlgirlgirl'" (174)
echoes this triple intersection of words, people, and desires. The
variable referent of "girl" (Nel's invocation to Sula or to herself)
points to language's plurisignifying potential to evoke missed people
(others), the missed self, missed meanings, and all the desire
encompassed in those yearnings for the "missed." The novel's
inconclusiveness, then, reiterates Sula's identity as desire without
object, as the narrative itself embodies that same sense of desire for
the reader.
Whereas, in Sula,
words fail to explain conventional objects (a restroom) or concepts
(God), in Beloved, language and expression in general fall short
because the experiences they strive to capture are peculiar- always
circumscribed by the legacy of having been owned. In her later work,
Morrison highlights the lack of vocabulary to speak the experience of
the enslaved self as well as the often perilous relation of the former
enslaved to a historically specific language which commodifies African
Americans. Beloved, then, redefines the duplicity of language with an
eye toward its historical warping.
One might begin to define the "something missing" in Beloved through
language and its often incomprehensible meanings. Morrison shows that
the mutations of time often place language out of reach, so that former
words cannot be recollected:
What
Nan told her [Sethe] had forgotten, along with the language she told it
in. . . . she was picking meaning out of a code she no longer
understood. (62)
Facing near
hieroglyphs in memory, Sethe must bypass the language and the words for
the meaning behind them. Thus, Morrison presents a gap in what Nan
says, and instead proposes what Nan "means:"
[Nan] told Sethe that her mother and Nan were together from the sea.
Both were taken up many times by the crew. "She threw them all away but
you. The one from the crew she threw away on the island. . . . Without
names, she threw them. You she gave the name of the black man. She put
her arms around him. The others she did not put her arms around." (62)
Morrison switches from third-person paraphrase of Nan's "meaning" to
direct quotations- fabricated quotations, however, since the original
words and language have been lost. In Sethe's distillation of meaning
from a forgotten "code," Morrison implies the dual construction of
meaning. The words here are as much fabricated by Sethe as they are
delivered by Nan, who, in turn, wishes to convey some elusive meaning
from Sethe's mother. This last meaning finally surfaces through a
series of deferrals, leaving the reader uncertain as to how to
interpret Nan's "words." Are they indicators of Sethe's relative
importance to her mother (since she has not met the fate of her
half-siblings)? Do they create a threatening picture of mother-love, as
Sethe's killing of Beloved has done for Howard and Buglar?
The difficulties of interpreting meaning pose dilemmas not only for
those recollecting the past, but also among characters sharing the same
narrative present. When Stamp Paid goes to visit the women of 124, he
encounters an incomprehensible language:
Out on Bluestone Road he thought he heard a conflagration of hasty
voices- loud, urgent, all speaking at once. . . . All he could make out
was the word mine. The rest of it stayed outside his mind's reach.
(172)
Though Stamp Paid "couldn't
describe [this speech] to save his life," the narrator (through Stamp
Paid's perspective) supplements this initial description with yet
another approximation of these "sounds":
[It was] like the interior sounds a woman makes when she believes she
is alone and unobserved at her work; a sth when she misses the needle's
eye; a soft moan when she sees another chip in her one good platter;
the low, friendly argument with which she greets the hens. Nothing
fierce or startling. Just that eternal, private conversation that takes
place between women and their tasks. (172)
One wonders whether Morrison, here, portrays more about the perceiver
than the perceived. That is, the male figure, representative of the
public workplace, glances in the window of the female privatized home,
and sees an alien space defined by domestic tasks and an exclusive
female presence (down to the hens). To him, the sounds remain
unintelligible, the significance of the "argument with which she greets
the hens" unfathomable.
As these
two examples attest, slippage of language in Beloved occurs between
persons who have lost contact. Unlike Sula and Nel, the main characters
of this later novel, with the exception of Beloved, remain discrete
entities, none having achieved the closeness implied in "two throats
and one eye." Even family members do not realize an affinity like
Sula's and Nel's. Sethe only knows her mother through two gestures: her
mother's revealing to Sethe her circle and cross brand, and the slap
Sethe receives upon requesting a similar mark (61); Joshua/Stamp Paid
displaces his emotional attachment to his wife Vashti by changing his
name rather than snapping her neck (233). In both cases, the distance
between mother-daughter and husband-wife must be maintained, for in the
pressurized atmosphere of slavery, close ties risk implosion. Thus,
Morrison implies how historical realities perpetuate a system that
precludes intimate contact: As Denver later articulates, "Slaves not
supposed to have pleasurable feelings on their own; their bodies not
supposed to be like that . . ." (209). Language's slippage and missed
meanings take place across migratory (and chronological) stretches,
allowing Morrison to contextualize the corruption of signifiers within
the historical exigencies of slavery and its aftermath.
In particular, Morrison shows how certain symbols become overdetermined
in meaning. Sethe's breasts, for instance, begin as signifiers of
nurturing. Sethe, who is pregnant with Denver but still has "'milk for
[her] baby girl,'" must get to Ohio where her daughter awaits her. Yet,
before Sethe leaves Sweet Home, Schoolteacher's nephews forcibly "rape"
her milk (16-17), reinscribing her breasts as sites of violation and
instruments through which to deprive her children of sustenance; they
also epitomize how "private" body parts become commodified, public, and
un-"own"-ed by the self. The overdetermined meaning of Sethe's breasts
results, in part, from the lack of an appropriate language to speak the
outrage of slavery. How can one describe the multiple injustices and
rage which slavery yields- the "unspeakable thoughts, unspoken" (199)?
Thus, tropes such as Sethe's breasts come to approximate the confluence
of emotions (guilt, shame, rage, grief, insecurity, terror, numbness .
. .) begotten from the "Peculiar Institution."
Likewise, Paul D's rooster becomes the only way for him to express a
degradation so severe that it remains unnamed by the narrative's
conclusion. In a conversation which begins reluctantly, with intentions
both not to tell and not to hear, Paul D finally tells Sethe of the
roosters:
"Mister [the rooster],
he looked so . . . free. Better than me. Stronger, tougher. Son a bitch
couldn't even get out the shell by hisself but he was still king and I
was . . ." Paul D stopped and squeezed his left hand with his right. .
. . "Mister was allowed to be and stay what he was. But I wasn't
allowed to be and stay what I was. Even if you cooked him you'd be
cooking a rooster named Mister. But wasn't no way I'd ever be Paul D
again, living or dead. . . . I was something else and that something
was less than a chicken sitting in the sun on a tub." (72)
The ellipses and hesitations throughout Paul D's speech tell of gaps
and deferrals in meaning. Paul D doesn't know whether he can "say it
right," or say it fully, and, in fact, as the narrative reveals, ". . .
what he was telling her was only the beginning" (72).
Morrison further compounds the meaning of roosters by associating
Mister's comb with Paul D's missing or buried "red heart": ". . . there
was no red heart bright as Mister's comb beating in him" (73). Red
heart and rooster approximate each other, even as they trope toward
some more ambiguous meaning. That meaning becomes further complicated
by Paul D's chanting "'Red heart'" as he touches Beloved "'on the
inside part'" (117)- an act which further shames him.
Morrison finally articulates a clearer image of Paul D's unnamed hurt
through a catalog of items:
A shudder ran through Paul D. . . . He didn't know if it was bad
whiskey, nights in the cellar, pig fever, iron bits, smiling roosters,
fired feet, laughing dead men, hissing grass, rain, apple blossoms,
neck jewelry, Judy in the slaughterhouse, Halle in the butter,
ghost-white stairs, chokecherry trees, cameo pins, aspens, Paul A's
face, sausage or the loss of a red, red heart.
"Tell me something, Stamp." Paul D's eyes were rheumy. "Tell me this
one thing. How much is a nigger supposed to take?" (235; italics added)
A shudder and exasperation flavor
Morrison's "meaning," which one might conjecture as the degradation of
having no agency, of being transformed or moved at will by another. The
breasts and roosters, as overdetermined metaphors for the "weight" of
being black in America during the late nineteenth century, hint at how
this "burden" cannot be expressed simply or singularly. Techniques such
as cataloging and metaphorical substitution, displacement, and
approximation aid Morrison in conveying the lack of vocabulary to
describe fully the degradation of slavery.
Not only words but also gestures become subject to slippage; and often
gestures (in themselves a comment on the need for supplements to words)
remain the expression of choice for those who have no access to the
"master language," Beloved, who returns from the dead, relies heavily
upon gesture to supplement her words. In response to Denver's question
"'What's it like over there, where you were before?'" Beloved replies,
"'Dark . . . I'm small in that place. I'm like this here.' She raised
her head off the bed, lay down on her side and curled up" (75).
Beloved's gesture seems to indicate a womb of darkness, but her later
assertions of her "crouching" with a "dead man on my face" (211) carry
suggestions of slave ship passage. More simply, the place "over there"
could be death, pre-birth, or void. To say that Beloved's words exhibit
missing pieces would be not only to state the obvious but also to
overlook Morrison's more masterful troping by gesture. Instead of
supplementing Beloved's meaning through additional words, Morrison
leaves Beloved's gesture literally at rest- not closed in meaning but
accepting of the gaps that already exist in memory and that widen
during the conveyance of meaning.
Beloved's "massage-stranglehold" of Sethe's neck becomes another
gesture of ambivalent meaning. Denver insists that Beloved has "'choked
[Sethe's] neck,'" whereas Beloved claims that she has "'kissed her
neck'" (101). Beloved's counterstatement does not necessarily negate
Denver's words, A too-strong kiss may strangle, just as a "too-thick
love" can result in "unmotherly" acts. Interestingly, Paul D
characterizes Sethe's love as "'too thick,'" to which Sethe responds,
"'Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all'" (164). Sethe
denies any texture or variable quality to love, while Paul D shows that
"love" inadequately describes the emotional relation one has to
another. He, thus, exposes "love" as a synecdoche of sorts that only
partially names Sethe's relationship to her children. Likewise, the
different interpretations of the "massage" as either chokehold or kiss
emerge from a similarly reductive (is or ain't) determination of
benevolent or malevolent intent. Yet Morrison consistently undermines
this benevolent/malevolent dichotomy, showing how love for the captive
female can manifest itself in both.
Morrison also shows how characters besides Beloved choose approximating
gestures over words. For instance, after Sethe discovers Beloved's
identity (as her returned "ghost" daughter), Sethe falls into a flurry
of mothering activity: playing with Beloved, braiding her hair, feeding
her "fancy food," and clothing her in "ribbon and dress goods" (240).
Presumably trying to make up for lost time, Sethe condenses her
gestures of care into two months, yet succeeds only in making Beloved,
Denver, and herself look "like carnival women with nothing to do"
(240). The narrative voice reveals the disjunction between Sethe's
pattern-making and the shallowness of result. Instead of the "real
thing," one has carnivalesque trappings without substance the displaced
substitute of some unrealizable desire.
The scapegoating of Sethe by various members in the community enacts a
similar substitutive gesture. Instead of accusing themselves, Ella and
Paul D, for instance, transfer self-censure onto the already publicly
identified "criminal," Sethe. Ella, who shuns Sethe after the Misery
(as Stamp Paid calls the Fugitive Slave Act and Sethe's desperate
response to it [171]), has herself orchestrated a child's death, "a
hairy white thing, fathered by 'the lowest yet,'" whom she "delivered,
but would not nurse" (258-59). Likewise, Paul D displaces his own shame
onto Sethe's recorded public act. As he listens to her explanation of
the newspaper article, Paul D judges Sethe's action as "'wrong'. . . .
'You got two feet, Sethe, not four'. . . . Later he would wonder what
made him say it. . . . How fast he had moved from his shame to hers"
(165). The two displacements allow Ella and Paul D, and by extension
the community, to voice the violence engendered by slavery in an
already constructed language. That is, they use the language of the
white judiciary, white newspapers, and white opinion to assess and fix
judgment upon Sethe's act. Instead of arriving at a new discourse to
express, encompass, and comprehend (but not necessarily mitigate)
Sethe's act, Ella and Paul D misappropriate Sethe's "crime" in order to
overlook and keep silent what they have no alternative words for.
"Missing" from the community, then, is a discourse for and about
public/private shame. Sethe has ruptured secreted guilt by displaying
"on the lawn"(1) the communally shared guilt over child abandonment,
malevolent love, and infanticide. Sethe's killing of Beloved remains an
inconceivable gesture whose meaning Beloved spends its entire length
trying to approximate. In Schoolteacher's nephew's reaction to Sethe's
killing in the woodshed, Morrison highlights the mistaken meanings
derived from decontextualized judgments:
What she go and do that for? On account of a beating? Hell, he'd been
beat a million times and he was white. . . . "What she go and do that
for?" (150)
The nephew reduces
Sethe's act to a response to a whipping. He compares it to his own
projected reaction, that "no way . . . could [he] have" done what she
did (150). Not being a slave, he cannot grasp the meaning of Sethe's
action, as perhaps that meaning may never be grasped through forgotten
agony and "official" versions of history.
Perhaps what is desired, then, is a language to explain and absolve, to
encompass all the nuance and ambiguity of motive and emotion- a
language which allows the women of 124 "to be what they liked, see
whatever they saw and say whatever was on their minds" (199). Morrison
approximates this desired language in the lyric section running from
pages 200 to 217, a rendition of interior consciousness, for, as Sethe
asserts, she doesn't need to vocally explain herself because Beloved
"understands everything already" (200). Only an unfallen language would
exhibit a unity of thought and word that would render verbalization
obsolete- a language in the beginning: "In the beginning there were no
words. in the beginning was the sound, and they all knew what that
sounded like" (259). Morrison allows that unfallen sounding to become
realized for an instant, which recalls the healing work of the
Clearing:
For Sethe it was as
though the Clearing had come to her with at its heat and simmering
leaves, where the voices of women searched for . . . the sound that
broke the back of words. . . . It broke over Sethe and she trembled
like the baptized in its wash. (261)
Morrison presents the "roaring" of the unspoken, which spiritually
blesses and absolves. Yet, this triumphant moment of wordless song
lasts only briefly, perhaps a glimpse of Paradise after the Fall.
Morrison makes clear that this type of language, though desired, cannot
often be realized- that the women of 124, for instance, can "say
whatever was on their minds. Almost" (199; italics added). Amongst
Sethe, Beloved, and Denver, much remains "unspeakable thoughts,
unspoken" (200). Sethe's monologue, for instance, projects into an
indeterminate future her "telling" of a specific knowledge: "I know
what it is to be without the milk that belongs to you. . . . I'll tell
Beloved about that; she'll understand" (200). Like Paul D's rooster,
Sethe's stolen milk signals such inexpressible emotions that Sethe
defers voicing them, even as she desires to make the incident
"understand[able]."
Morrison
soberly returns the narrative to language's limitations. Words, akin to
the "spores of bluefern growing in the hollows along the riverbank,"
have the potential to "live out [their] days as planned" (84); i.e., to
express authentically. Instead of realizing that intent, however, the
spore collapses and the certainty of its expression- its full bloom-
"lasts no longer than [a moment!; longer, perhaps than the spore
itself" (84).
Morrison does not
simply refer to language here. The spore also represents the promise of
human life and the fragility of that promise for the enslaved. As
former slave Harriet Jacobs observed while watching "two beautiful
children playing together" (one a "fair white child," the other her
slave), "I foresaw the inevitable blight that would fall on the little
slave's heart. I knew how soon her laughter would be changed to sighs"
(Jacobs 29). The slave, denied possession of her body, will never
realize the promise implied by and borne out in the fruition of her
white counterpart. Possessed by another, the enslaved suffers from a
fragmentation of self (literal as well as figurative),(2) or as Paul D
phrases it, not being able "'to be and stay what I was'" (72).
Morrison's characters can only obliquely refer to the situation of
being denied a self. For instance, Sethe mentions that "there was no
nursing milk to call my own" (200), referring to the shared milk she
took as a child from Nan's breasts and her own milk forcibly taken from
her by Schoolteacher's nephews. After escaping to Ohio, she claims her
post-slavery sense of self by reappropriating her milk for no one but
"my own children" (200); through reclaimed agency over her milk, Sethe
points to herself as no longer the possession of another.
However, Sethe still evokes her self through others: For Sethe, "the
best thing she was, was her children" (251). Even when she earlier
conjectures her possible death, Sethe couches it in terms of her baby,
"'I believe this baby's ma'am is gonna die in wild onions on the bloody
side of the Ohio River.'. . . And it didn't seem such a bad idea . . ."
(31). Yet, because she is the "baby's ma'am," Sethe attempts to
survive, a decision born of concern not for herself but for her baby.
Thus, akin to Morrison's Sula, whose identity remains incomplete,
Sethe, too, only proceeds toward an investment in herself as her own
"'best thing'" (273). Nel's voiced realization of herself as separate
from her mother's influence "'I'm me . . . . Me'" (Sula 28)- becomes
echoed in Sethe's concluding remarks which indicate a recognition of
the self- but with a difference: "'Me? Me?'" (273). This
faux-conclusion to Sethe's narrative revises the stable self implied in
Nel's "'I'm me . . . . Me,'" emphasizing the striving toward rather
than any realized definition of self.
Beloved's other conclusion (an epilogue?) also thematizes an
open-endedness to words, narrative, and desires. In one phrase, "This
is not a story to pass on" (275), Morrison seemingly closes her story
as well as gestures toward unwriting her narrative. Like the
"footprints" by the stream which "come and go, come and go," her
narrative seems to imprint and efface itself- much as Beloved has done
within collective memory. The community deliberately forgets her "like
a bad dream" (274), actively absenting her from their recollections;
however, the narrative announces her as the final word of the text-
"Beloved"- that which is desired, missing, yet elusively present.
While Sula appears overtly to thematize the notion of signification's
duplicity, Beloved grounds language's slippage to the not so distant
history of slavery in America. Perhaps Morrison signifies(3) on the
earlier text, attempting a redefinition or respecifying of
postmodernism's general emphasis on the instability of meaning; that
is, whereas Sula capitalizes on the notion of language as
aprioristically corrupt, Beloved does not take for granted that there
is only one language (i.e., that defined by semioticians or that
practiced by Schoolteacher and his nephews).
Morrison contextualizes "corrupt" language as historically specific,
even against deconstructionist theories which atemporalize and
universalize language. Her historicization in Beloved thus speaks on
some level about the limits of poststructuralist findings for African
American writers who remain doubly circumscribed by a language which
can no longer convey authentically, but which has hitherto effectively
constructed black subjects as less than human. Her grounding of
discursive slippage to historical circumstances thus offers a praxis of
resistance to these theories which would subsume all narratives as
corruptions, just when alternate narratives taking the formerly
enslaved as their subjects are beginning to emerge. Thus, whereas in
Sula, language's slippage exists a priori, in Beloved, gaps and missed
meanings evolve from specific sites of corruption due to historical
circumstances. In neither text, however, are lapses elided or desires
achieved. In effect, Morrison wishes to indulge two seemingly
contradictory gestures: to make "Peace" a longing, and to make people
"at rest" with this longing piece.
Notes
1. In Thinking Through the Body, Jane Gallop describes Joanne
Michulski's 1974 killing and dismemberment of her two children as
bringing "violence by and to the mother- out of the home and onto the
lawn, into the public eye . . . [effectively] reinscrib[ing] it in the
world of work and meaning, power and knowledge" (2). Likewise, Sethe,
rather than having fallen away from a community's mores, has actually
enacted a public spectacle of the community's already shared, secreted
history. She effectively reinscribes private crime onto public space.
2. Morrison symbolizes this literal fragmentation in Schoolteacher's
dissection of his slaves' body parts: their division into animal
characteristics on the right side of the page and human characteristics
on the left (Beloved 193).
3. The
practice of "Signifyin(g)," according to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is
"repetition and revision, or repetition with a signal difference"
(Monkey xxiv). Gates expands the purview of "signifyin(g)" to include
African American intertextuality or the activity of "black writers
read[ing] and critiqu[ing] other black texts as an act of rhetorical
self-definition" (Figures 242). I suggest that Morrison, in Beloved,
signifies on the very work of signification in Sula. That is, she
repeats with a signal difference the thematics of language slippage so
apparent in Sula, the difference being the grounding of that language
slippage to historical event.
Works Cited
Davis, Christina. "Beloved: A Question of Identity." Presence Africaine
145 (1988): 151-56.
Derrida, Jacques. "Differance." Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays
on Husserl's Theory of Signs. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973. 129-60.
Gallop, Jane. Thinking Through the Body. New York: Columbia UP, 1988.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the
"Racial" Self. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.
-----. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary
Criticism. New York: Oxford UP, 1988.
Grant, Robert. "Absence into Presence: The Thematics of Memory and
'Missing' Subjects in Toni Morrison's Sula." McKay 90-103.
Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Ed. Jean Fagan
Yellin. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987.
McDowell, Deborah. "'The Self and the Other': Reading Toni Morrison's
Sula and the Black Female Text." McKay 77-89.
McKay, Nellie Y., ed. Critical Essays on Toni Morrison. Boston: Hall,
1988.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987.
-----. Sula. 1973. New York: Plume, 1982.
Spillers, Hortense J. "A Hateful Passion, A Lost Love." Feminist
Studies 9.2 (1983): 293-323.
Rachel Lee is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at the
University of California, Los Angeles. Currently, she is working on her
dissertation, entitled "The Americas of Asian American Literature."
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