“something else to be”1

1.  Sula 52. I am grateful to Ato Quayson, Gerard Greenway and Angelaki's reviewers.

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Notes

notes

1.  Sula 52. I am grateful to Ato Quayson, Gerard Greenway and Angelaki's reviewers.

2.  Morrison does mix the singular with the unsurprising, the predictable, and with psychological realism. For example, Eva predictably feels hatred for her husband who left her and comes back with another woman in Sula.

3.  Morrison mixes the undecidability of the singular with more didactic and clearer situations. Deek's “barefoot walk” is clearly a moral breakthrough in Paradise (P 300); the relationship between Sixo and Patsy the Thirty-Mile Woman across seventeen hours of secret walking is clearly a colossal achievement in Beloved; Romen's goodness is certain in Love.

4.  For a discussion of this distinction in Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, see Goulimari, section 3.

5.  In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari describe the constitution of collectivities in terms of three syntheses – connection, disjunction, conjunction – and distinguish between two uses of these syntheses: a “schizorevolutionary” (277) or deterritorialising use constituting collectivities as pure or non-totalisable multiplicities, and a “paranoiac fascisizing” (277) or reterritorialising use constituting collectivities caught in a double bind between totalisation and fragmentation. (Deleuze and Guattari's underlying argument is that collectivities should be distinguished not according to their aims but according to their mode of constitution.) In relation to disjunction or the “disjunctive synthesis” (see especially Anti-Oedipus 75–84), the “schizorevolutionary” use, which Deleuze and Guattari call “inclusive disjunction” or “… either… or… or…,” treats “partial objects” (the constituent parts of a collectivity) – “partial objects” such as the acts of Sethe, Ella and Stamp Paid – as distinct but connected, on an immanent field produced by them. The “paranoiac fascisizing” use of the “disjunctive synthesis” has two aspects. First, it turns this immanent, produced field into a transcendent, producing field which (like capital and workers in Marx) appropriates the work – the connections – of “partial objects” while appearing as their mysterious “quasi cause” (Anti-Oedipus 10–11, 72–74). Deleuze and Guattari call this latter field an “artificial territoriality.” Second, the “paranoiac fascisizing” use of the disjunctive synthesis differentiates by means of binary opposition – what Deleuze and Guattari call “exclusive disjunction” and “either/or.” For example, it makes an “exclusive disjunction” between differentiation as “exclusive disjunction” versus a fearful chaos of undifferentiation – “disjunctions are subjected to the alternative of the undifferentiated or exclusion” (Anti-Oedipus 120). Despite their ostensible opposition, both “exclusive disjunction” and undifferentiation halt connections, disallow them in advance. What possible connection can there be between the two sides of an “exclusive disjunction”? Similarly, whereas “partial objects” in “inclusive disjunction” are both distinct and connected, a chaos of undifferentiation comprises elements as indistinct as they are incapable of connection to each other – once again, connection is disallowed. But “the alternative of the undifferentiated or exclusion” is a false dilemma excluding “inclusive disjunctions.” Whereas the “paranoiac fascisizing” use of the disjunctive synthesis excludes the “schizorevolutionary” use, the “schizorevolutionary” use includes the “paranoiac fascisizing” use. More broadly, whereas the “paranoiac fascisizing” or reterritorialising excludes the “schizorevolutionary” or deterritorialising, the “schizorevolutionary” or deterritorialising includes the “paranoiac fascisizing” or reterritorialising.

6.  Morrison says:

My own sense of enchantment simply comes because that's the way the world was for me and for the black people that I knew….. I grew up in a house in which people talked about their dreams with the same authority that they talked about what “really” happened. They had visitations and did not find that fact shocking…. (Interview with Christina Davis, “Beloved: A Question of Identity,” Presence Africaine 145 [1988]: 144. Quoted by Valerie Smith [ed.], New Essays on Song of Solomon 10)

Morrison, as far as I am aware, first uses the term “enchantment” in Beloved 37.

7.  Throughout Love, Morrison presents truth as a stone: “the veil parted to expose a wide plateau of lifeless stone” (L 132). She presents imagination or storytelling as an efflux and slowly brings the two – truth and imagination – together:

Just a bleak ridge of stone and no one to imagine it otherwise, because that is the way it is – as, deep down, everyone knows.. An unborn world where sound, any sound… is a gift. Where a human voice is the only miracle and the only necessity. (L 184)

 … escape from watching and watchers. Like stars free to make their own history… like diamonds unburdened, released [stars, diamonds falling like tears] into handsome rock. (L 194)

Finally, Morrison explicitly brings the two together on the novel's closing pages (L 201–02), where Celestial hums her song perched on Bill Cosey's grave. She inspires L, Love's narrator, to hum Love.

8.  Terry Otten argues that Pecola's impotence “produces melodrama, however, not high tragedy” in The Bluest Eye. Terry Otten (16).

9.  In The Bluest Eye, Cholly Breedlove, abandoned by both parents, is “godlike,” “truly free” and “[d]angerously free” before meeting Pauline, his wife (BE 125–26), while Soaphead Church compares himself to God (BE 143–44).

10.  Michael Awkward is, as far as I am aware, the first critic to discuss scapegoating in The Bluest Eye. See Chapter 2 of his Inspiriting Influences: Tradition, Revision and Afro-American Women's Novels.

11.  Victor Shklovsky 18. In the opening pages of Playing in the Dark Morrison defines the task of literature as imagining the unimaginable and “entering what one is estranged from” (4), from Homer's “heart-eating cyclops” (3) to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

12.  See BE 63–72, where this distinction is outlined.

13.  This “phantasy” is an instance of a “bad” imagination. In Morrison's early novels, imagination is often suspect – it is the “bad” imagination underlying racism and scapegoating – and it is important to undo its work.

14.  In “Système du délire,” published shortly after the original publication in French of Violence and the Sacred, Girard contrasts the latter to Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, also published in French in 1972.

15.  Girard's theory assumes (to single out one assumption) that aggression, rivalry, hostility, and the crises of society that they bring about emanate from the inferior members of society who desire their masters’ place. In “Plato and the Simulacrum” and in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze had reversed this assumption: it is the “rightful owner” of power – the master – who fears and resents the inferior and the powerless as potential pretenders and claimants. In his reading of the Platonic triangle of: a) the Idea as the model, b) the true representative or claimant of the Idea as the good copy of the model (the icon), and c) the false representative or claimant of the Idea as the bad copy of the model (the simulacrum), Deleuze argues that what is at stake is not to distinguish between model and copies, but to distinguish between good and bad copies, representatives, and claimants. He writes: “[t]he function of the notion of the model is not to oppose the world of images in its entirety but to select the good images…. Platonism as a whole is erected on the basis of this wish to hunt down the phantasms or simulacra” – it is a “test which decides between claimants” (Difference and Repetition 127). Devised by the “rightful owner” of power, it excludes all future pretenders and rivals as fraudulent and harmful to the Idea.

16.  If not loved, Pecola is befriended by Claudia and Frieda, and by the three whores, China, Poland, and Miss Marie.

17.  The Bottom was a “place” (S 3) – “Maybe it hadn't been a community, but it had been a place” (S 166).

18.  Able-bodied single men, on the other hand, gravitate towards cities. When Eva's husband, BoyBoy, returns for a brief visit, he bears the signs of big-city living (S 35).

19.  We come across Edna's ice-cream shop, Irene's Palace of Cosmetology, Reba's Grill (S 49).

20.  Philip M. Royster, in “A Priest and a Witch against the Spiders and the Snakes: Scapegoating in Toni Morrison's Sula,” is the first critic to discuss scapegoating in Sula, as far as I am aware.

21.  J. Brooks Bouson, in Quiet as It's Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison, reads the many sudden and unexplained deaths of Sula as signs of Morrison's still unsuccessful struggle with and internalisation of racist stereotypes. These deaths are “repeated stagings of the contempt-disappear scenario” (73).

22.  See Nietzsche's psychological reading of scapegoating: On the Genealogy of Morals, Third Essay, sect. 15, page 127.

23.  Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, sects. 10–11, pages 36–43.

24.  Many commentators have argued that Sula and Nel are complementary aspects of the same self. This invites comparison with Aristophanes’ myth of Love in Plato's Symposium, of separated halves that seek each other out: Plato, Symposium 188e–193e, 58–65.

25.  In “The Art of Fiction,” Morrison herself identified the novelty of Sula as resting on the singular friendship between Sula and Nel: “To have heterosexual women who are friends, who are talking only about themselves to each other, seemed to me a very radical thing when Sula was published in 1973” (Furman 252). “The Art of Fiction” [Toni Morrison interviewed by Elissa Schappell], Paris Review 128 (fall 1993); reprinted in Jan Furman (ed.), Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon: A Casebook. Morrison returns to this theme in her last novel, Love.

26.  With the exception of Sula's self-affirming acts upon her return to the Bottom.

27.  “Not only is African-American culture split off from but still part of the dominant American culture, it is itself a pluralistic entity. By definition, African-American culture is a combination of African and Euro-American elements.” (Philip Page, Dangerous Freedom: Fusion and Fragmentation in Toni Morrison's Novels 12–13).

28.  Bearing one's burden and flying come together in the figure of Pilate, in Morrison's next novel, Song of Solomon.