Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison's Later Novels

Jean Wyatt

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780820350592
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Nordamerikanische Literaturkritik

In Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison's Later Novels, Jean Wyatt explores the interaction among ideas of love, narrative innovation, and reader response in Toni Morrison's seven later novels. Love comes in a new and surprising shape in each of the later novels; for example, Love presents it as the deep friendship between little girls; in Home it acts as a disruptive force producing deep changes in subjectivity; and in Jazz it becomes something one innovates and recreates each moment—like jazz itself. Each novel's unconventional idea of love requires a new experimental narrative form.

Wyatt analyzes the stylistic and structural innovations of each novel, showing how disturbances in narrative chronology, surprise endings, and gaps mirror the dislocated temporality and distorted emotional responses of the novels' troubled characters and demand that the reader situate the present-day problems of the characters in relation to a traumatic African American past. The narrative surprises and gaps require the reader to become an active participant in making meaning. And the texts' complex narrative strategies draw out the reader's convictions about love, about gender, about race—and then prompt the reader to reexamine them, so that reading becomes an active ethical dialogue between text and reader. Wyatt uses psychoanalytic concepts to analyze Morrison's narrative structures and how they work on readers. Love and Narrative Form devotes a chapter to each of Morrison's later novels: Beloved, Jazz, Paradise, Love, A Mercy, Home, and God Help the Child.

CHAPTER 1

Maternal Language and Maternal History in Beloved

Beloved (1987) represents a radical shift in Toni Morrison’s literary techniques.¹ Abandoning the largely chronological ordering and realist discourse of her early novels, Morrison introduces disruptions of syntax and grammar that reflect the troubled psychic worlds of the ex-slaves who are her characters.² For example, the narrative discourse mirrors Sethe’s idiosyncratic view of herself as a maternal body inseparable from her children through linguistic innovations like literalization and the erasure of the separation between subject positions. And Morrison deploys a temporally convoluted narrative structure that reflects Sethe’s disrupted temporality. The narrative structure has ethical effects as well. We do not know until we have read more than half the novel that it was Sethe who killed her baby; so we are likely to view the murder within the context of her life experience. The structure of deferred disclosure thus discourages a rush to judgment and trains a reader to make contextual judgments. Beloved launches a series of late novels that, through subtle structural means, provoke an ethical dialogue between text and reader.

This chapter focuses on Sethe’s mother-love. Sethe rescued her four children from slavery some eighteen years before the novel opens; she then killed one of them in order to prevent her being returned to slavery. In the present day, the baby’s ghost returns to Sethe in the figure of Beloved, and mother and daughter (along with Sethe’s second daughter, Denver) withdraw from the world into a maternal fusion that imitates the closeness of a nursing connection between mother and infant. The scholarship on Sethe’s maternal love includes many astute interpretations of her overclose connection to her children (see footnote 10). I extend both psychoanalytic and historical approaches to Sethe’s mothering. On the one hand, I use a Lacanian framework to connect Sethe’s troubled relation to language to her stubborn maternal resistance to the principles of separation and substitution necessary to symbolization. On the other hand, I supply an extratextual historical background for Sethe’s relation to her own slave mother drawn from the archival work of contemporary historians of slavery.

Sethe’s mother-love is complicated, unfolding layer by layer as a reader makes her way through the novel. Even at the surface, on a superficial reading, a reader can plainly see that Sethe is overattached to her children and unwilling to acknowledge even a minimal separation from them. But it is only as the narrative progresses that a reader gradually uncovers the multiple dimensions of slavery that have shaped Sethe’s attitudes toward her children. At first unable to put into words (or even conscious thought) her feelings of being neglected by her own mother, Sethe begins to recover, under Beloved’s relentless questioning, the memory of her mother’s scar and the memory of her mother’s hat. It is up to the reader to pull together these material signs of a maternal body and so compose the story of Sethe’s childhood, a story of maternal distance. Behind the sparse textual references to Sethe’s mother is the historical context of slave mothering. As contemporary scholars of slavery tell us, motherhood under slavery was structured by a conflict between the master’s demands for slave mothers’ labor and the slave child’s needs for nurturing. The historical supplement on the actual practices of slave mothers in this chapter extends Morrison’s own oblique references to the history of slave mothering. And it fills in gaps in Sethe’s story, giving shape to her childhood experience of maternal absence. It is in part as compensation for that maternal absence that Sethe insists on an uninterrupted closeness to her own children.

And then, beyond the practices of slave mothering lies the still more obscured history of the Middle Passage. The scholarship on Beloved has fully acknowledged the relation of Beloved to the Middle Passage, but it has not yet sufficiently explored the link between Sethe and the Middle Passage—yet it is important. The Middle Passage has cut Sethe off from the African maternal culture that would have guided her in mothering her own children. One factor contributing to the lacks and excesses of Sethe’s mothering, then, is the linguistic and cultural rupture with Sethe’s African maternal legacy.

Ambiguity has ethical force in Beloved. In the effort to pull together the scattered clues to Sethe’s deprived childhood, to the conditions of slave mothering, and to the cultural losses attendant on the Middle Passage, and to think through how all these dimensions of slavery have led to Sethe’s excessive mothering, a reader must perforce invest her own powers of synthesis and imaginative reconstruction. That personal investment in a constantly widening understanding of the deprivations and impossible choices of mothering under slavery has the potential to broaden the reader’s range of empathy to encompass even an understanding of Sethe’s choice to kill her child, rather than let her be taken back into slavery.³

Similarly, the narrative structure itself offers a lesson in ethics. The narrative disclosure that Sethe killed her baby daughter reaches us belatedly, so that we have to read the infanticide within the context of the absolute maternal devotion that Sethe has displayed throughout the first half of the novel. That structure of deferred disclosure prevents a too quick knee-jerk reaction to the fact of infanticide and trains us to defer judgment on a person’s action till we know all the details of his or her life situation. What George Eliot tries to do through direct moral exhortation—telling her reader that “moral judgments must remain false and hollow unless they are checked and enlightened by a perpetual reference to the special circumstances that mark the individual lot” (Mill 521)—Morrison accomplishes through the workings of narrative structure on the reader.⁴

The Maternal Body in Language:
A Discourse of Presence

Sethe pictures her relation to her children as a nursing connection; long after they are weaned, her bond with them remains so strong that she continues to think of it as a nursing relationship. I want to pursue the effects of Sethe’s perseveration in the role of maternal body on language—both on Sethe’s own capacity for language and on the language of the text.

The description of Sethe’s escape from slavery highlights several competing dimensions of her maternal subjectivity. First, her commitment to her children undeniably gives her courage. In presenting Sethe’s journey from slavery in Kentucky to the free state of Ohio as a maternal quest, Morrison is elaborating the figure of the heroic slave mother that in many female slave narratives replaces the figure of the heroic male fugitive.⁵ Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, for instance, turns the rhetoric of heroic resolve common to male slave narratives into a discourse of maternal courage: “I was resolved that I would foil my master and save my children, or I would perish in the attempt”; “Every trial I endured, every sacrifice I made for [the children’s] sakes, drew them closer to my heart, and gave me fresh courage” (84, 89–90). If Jacobs (and other female slave narrators, like Lucy Delaney) appropriates the conventions of male heroism for the celebration of motherhood, Morrison in turn reconstructs the acts of maternal heroism as the reproductive feats of the female body. Jacobs writes, “It was more for my helpless children than for myself that I longed for freedom” (89); Sethe turns Jacobs’s spiritual commitment to her children into a physical connection to the nursing baby she has sent on ahead: “I had to get my milk to my baby girl” (16). Sethe, like Jacobs, experiences the wish to give up the fight for survival and die, but while Jacobs says she was “willing to bear on” “for the children’s sakes” (127), the reason that Sethe gives for enduring is the presence of the baby in her womb: “[I]t didn’t seem such a bad idea [to die], . . . but the thought of herself stretched out dead while the little antelope lived on . . . in her lifeless body grieved her so” that she persevered (31).

As Sethe reports the triumphant close of her maternal quest, “I was big, Paul D, and deep and wide and when I stretched out my arms all my children could get in between. I was that wide” (162; italics in original). Later, her claim is that “she had milk enough for all” (162, 100). Thus the “nurturing power of the slave mother” that Henry Louis Gates finds in female slave narratives (Gates, “Introduction” xxxi) becomes literal in Morrison’s account: Sethe’s monumental body and abundant milk give and sustain life. But despite its mythic dimensions, the maternal body appears to lack a subjective center. During the journey, Sethe experiences her own existence only in relation to her children’s survival. As she feels she is dying from her wounds, she is “concerned” not for herself but “for the life of her children’s mother”; she thinks, “I believe this baby’s ma’am is gonna die” and pictures herself as “a crawling graveyard for a six-month baby’s last hours” (30, 31, 34). Identifying the self only as the ground of her children’s being—the container of her unborn baby and the carrier of her nursling’s milk—Sethe loses sight of her own sufferings and her own need for survival. While celebrating the determination and courage that Sethe draws from her attachment to her children, Morrison’s narrative also dramatizes the problematic aspects of Sethe’s maternal self-definition, which is so embedded in her children that it allows her to kill the nursing baby that she continues, long after its birth, to perceive as “part of her” (163).

Sethe’s sense of continuity with her children also makes it difficult for her to take the position of narrating subject and tell her story.⁶ Her troubled relation to language can be read as a carryover from a nursing mother’s attitude toward separation. When she engineered her family’s escape from slavery, Sethe had to send her baby ahead of her to Ohio: “I told the women in the wagon . . . to put sugar water in cloth to suck from so when I got there in a few days [the baby] wouldn’t have forgot me. The milk would be there and I would be there with it” (16). Sethe would not compromise with absence, overlooking the potentially life-threatening lack of food for her baby “for a few days” to insist on presence: her milk would be “there,” and the mother would be “there with it.” For Sethe, the standpoint of nursing mother precludes separation and the substitutions that any separation would require.

Sethe’s embrace of a relational system of presence and connection, her reluctance to accept the principle of substitution, extends to her refusal to invest in words and helps explain the link between her failure to tell the story of her baby girl’s death and that baby’s embodiment in Beloved. Lacan’s account of a child’s entry into language opposes bodily connection and verbal exchange in a way that clarifies Sethe’s attitude. To move into a position in language and the social order according to Lacan, an infant must sacrifice its imaginary sense of wholeness and continuity with the mother’s body. (Sethe is of course in the mother’s position rather than the child’s, but her physical connection with her nursing baby resembles the infant’s initial radical dependency on the mother’s body.) In “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” Lacan borrows from Freud a mother-child anecdote that crystallizes the either-or choice between maternal bodily presence and abstract signifier. Freud’s grandson Ernst becomes a speaking subject in the same moment that he acknowledges his mother’s absence. Ernst’s one game, Freud says, is to throw a spool attached to a thread far away from him and bring it back to the accompaniment of sounds (“ooo! aaa!”); Freud interprets these sounds as the signifiers “Fort! Da!” (“Gone! There!”). Initially using the spool as a symbol for the mother, Ernst then moves to a higher level of symbolization when he substitutes signifiers—“Fort” and “Da”—for bodies. He thus assumes a symbolic mastery over what he cannot control in reality—his mother’s absence and return (Freud, Beyond 8–10). Lacan adds that the child “thereby raises his desire to a second power,” investing desire in language (“Function” 103). By acknowledging that he must put a signifier there where his mother’s body used to be, the child both recognizes absence and accepts loss. The word “manifests itself first of all as the murder of the thing” (“Function” 104)—or, in John Muller’s gloss, “the word destroys the immediacy of objects and gives us distance from them” (29).

It is this distance, this loss, that Sethe rejects. Just as she declined any mediation between her body and her nursing baby, she now refuses to replace that baby with a signifier and tell the story of the baby’s death. (Sethe is never able to tell the story of the infanticide, leaving it to be narrated first through the demeaning focalization of the slave-owner and then through the more sympathetic focalization of Stamp Paid.)⁷ Sethe refuses to accept the irrevocability of absence by putting the child’s death into words. Her denial of loss is fundamentally antimetaphorical—that is, the refusal to displace libido onto words is a refusal to let one thing stand for another and so impedes the whole project of speech. Sethe remains without a narrative but with the baby ghost—there, embodied, a concrete presence.

Textual practice seconds Sethe’s emphasis on presence by rejecting metaphorical substitutions for the maternal body. In the opening scene Paul D, an ex-slave from the same plantation as Sethe, finds her after a separation of eighteen years. After Sethe has told Paul D about her escape from slavery, on a quest to get her milk to the baby in Ohio, he cups her breasts from behind in a display of tenderness: “What she knew was that the responsibility for her breasts, at last, was in somebody else’s hands” (18). The reader does a double take: the phrase “in somebody else’s hands” usually functions as a metaphor meaning “someone else’s responsibility”: here the hands are literally there, and what rests in them is not an abstract concept but flesh. The same slippage occurs in the next sentence, as Sethe imagines being “relieved of the weight of her breasts” (18). Because weight appears within the usually figurative phrase “relieved of the weight of,” readers assume that it is a metaphor for care or responsibility, but the modifying phrase “of her breasts” gives weight back its literal meaning. When the maternal body becomes the locus of discourse, the metaphorical becomes the actual, a move that reinforces Sethe’s definition of motherhood as an embodied responsibility: there are no substitutes, metaphorical or otherwise, for her breasts.

In the same passage, Paul D “reads” the story of slavery engraved on Sethe’s back by a final savage beating. Because the scar tissue is without sensation—“her back skin had been dead for years”—Sethe’s back is, in a sense, not her own; it has been appropriated and reified as a tablet on which the slave masters have inscribed their code, marking Sethe as slave. Sethe cannot substitute for this discourse of violence her own version of the event, in spite of Paul D’s repeated insistence that she tell him about it (17). Instead, Sethe repeats Amy Denver’s description of the wound left by the whipping as “a whole tree on my back . . . that’s what she said it looked like. A chokecherry tree” (15–16). Unable to seize the word and thus become master of her own experience, Sethe remains “a body whose flesh . . . bears . . . the marks of a cultural text” that inscribes her as slave (Spillers 67).

Sethe does not begin to take a position as speaking subject in the symbolic order until the end of the narrative, where with the encouragement of Paul D she starts to accept the loss of the baby: “She left me,” she says of her baby Beloved, finally acknowledging absence and substituting a word (“she”) for the baby’s body.

The Nursing Connection and Language

The action of Beloved gets underway when Paul D, an ex-slave from the same plantation as Sethe, finds his way to her Ohio home. After Paul D, Sethe, and Denver live together for a time, a figure named Beloved joins them; Denver, and the reader too, pick up on clues that the nineteen-year-old woman embodies the ghost of the baby Sethe killed. For some time the adults try to maintain the configuration of a nuclear family—mother, father, two daughters—but finally Beloved’s jealous desire to be the sole object of Sethe’s love and attention drives Paul D from the household. Soon after, Sethe begins to understand that Beloved is the dead baby “come back to [her] in the flesh” (200), and mother and daughters retreat to a state of undifferentiated maternal union.⁸

“Nobody will ever get my milk no more except my children,” Sethe declares as she closes the door on the outside world. The imagery of mother’s milk governs this section of part 2, as mother and daughters live out a nursing fantasy writ large. Sethe does not actually breastfeed Beloved, but, ecstatic that her murdered baby girl has returned to her in the figure of Beloved, she overfeeds Beloved while “Beloved lapp[ed] devotion like cream” (243). Beloved becomes “bigger, plumper by the day” while Sethe’s “flesh” grows “thin as china silk” (239), in a grotesque exaggeration of the mother feeding the baby with her own substance.

Nursing imagery represents the willed regression of the three participants to a maternal merger in which identities are inseparable and indistinguishable.⁹ Sethe is primed for such a regression by her resistance to the separations and substitutions required by the symbolic order and her stubborn adherence to the dead nursling. Beloved embodies a nursing child cut off from life before the entry into the symbolic and is consequently unable to distinguish self from other: “I am not separate from her there is no place where I stop” (210). Even Denver voices the amorphous boundaries between herself and her mother and sister: “I swallowed [my sister’s] blood right along with my mother’s milk” (205). For Denver, too, at least for the moment, bodily fluids overrun the boundaries between self and other, conflating identities.

How can there be a dialogue among those who resist the ground rules of language, who refuse separation and the substitution of words for bodies? Yet a dialogue among the three provides the centerpiece of part 2. Since many critics have written, and written well, on the mother-daughter relationships in Beloved and the language that characterizes them,¹⁰ I will confine my remarks on the mother-daughter dialogue to the subject of the present inquiry: the linguistic innovations that attempt to capture feeling states not usually entered into literary discourse and the range of possible reader responses to them.

The speakers in the three-way dialogue in Beloved reject the separation of persons required by the subject positions of language, where “I” is separate from “you” and “she”: they insist on the interpenetration of identities. Consequently, their language erases linguistic demarcations between self and other:

I have your milk. . . .

I brought your milk (216).

It is impossible to determine who is speaking: Does the “I” in “I have your milk” refer to Sethe, who might be saying that she “has” (is carrying) Beloved’s milk, or to Beloved, who could just as well be the “I” who speaks, saying that she “has” Sethe’s milk inside her? The dedifferentiation of possessive pronouns dramatizes the impossibility of separating what belongs to the one body from what belongs to the other when the two are joined by the milk that flows between them.

Dialogue among speaking subjects (ideally) moves toward the discovery of something new; the exchange of ideas gives each speaker the opportu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Love and Narrative Form
• Chapter 1: Maternal Language and Maternal History in Beloved
• Chapter 2: Riffing on Love and Playing with Narration in Jazz
• Chapter 3: Displacement—Political, Psychic, and Textual—in Paradise
• Chapter 4: Love’s Time and the Reader Ethical Effects of Nachträglichkeit (Afterwardsness) in Love
• Chapter 5: Failed Messages, Maternal Loss, and Narrative Form in A Mercy
• Chapter 6: Severed Limbs, the Uncanny, and the Return of the Repressed in Home
• Chapter 7: Love, Trauma, and the Body in God Help the Child
• Conclusion: Revisioning Love and Slavery
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index