"Circles and Circles of Sorrow": In the Wake of Morrison's Sula Author(s): Phillip Novak Reviewed work(s): Source: PMLA,

Vol. 114, No. 2 (Mar., 1999), pp. 184-193 Published by: Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/463390 . Accessed: 08/11/2011 12:34
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Modern Language Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to PMLA.

http://www.jstor.org

PhillipNovak

"Circles
In

and Wake

Circles of

of

Sorrow":

the

Morrison's

Sula

PHILLIP NOVAK teaches in the English departments at Cornell University and at Le Moyne College. His publications include essays on Faulkner (Faulkner Journal, 1996) and on Faulknerand Morrison (Unflinching Gaze: Morrison and Faulkner Re-envisioned, ed. Carol Kolmerten et al., UP of Mississippi, 1997). The present essay is part of a bookmournlengthprojectexamining ing as a structuraland thematic concern of twentieth-century UnitedStatesfiction.

And that would be sayingfarewell, repeating farewell, Just to be thereandjust to behold. WallaceStevens, "WavingAdieu, Adieu, Adieu"

EAR THE OUTSET of Toni Morrison's Sula-indeed, in the first paragraph of the narrative proper-the reader is presented with an image of gruesome, catastrophic violence: Wincing at the pain in his foot, [Shadrack]turnedhis head a little to the right and saw the face of a soldier nearhim fly off. Before he could registershock, the rest of the soldier's head disappearedunderthe invertedsoup bowl of his helmet. But stubbornly,taking no direction from the brain, the body of the headless soldier ran on, with energy and grace, ignoring altogether the drip and slide of braintissue down its back. (8) The violence involved in the elaboration of this image-by which I mean not only the brutality of the scene described but the brutality as well of the language used to describe it-lies, of course, right on the surface: in the emphasis on the eruptive, disruptive action presented (because the narrative records not a sequence of events but an image, the soldier's head seems simply to explode); in the odd appropriateness of the inverted soup-bowl metaphor for the helmet, which still contains the now soupy, liquified brains of the running soldier; in the graphic depiction of the "drip and slide" of the man's ravaged "tissue." The violence here is dramatically foregrounded, inescapable-an assault effected within the margins of a representation of an assault, the first and last of Shadrack's encounters with the enemy. There is more to this opening assault of the novel, however, than the violence it describes and engages in, for the image of the anonymous soldier's dying is also distinctly aestheticized-presented as an image,

184

Phillip Novak

185

an object of more or less disinterestedobservation. Although the rendering of the scene is in some ways confrontationally brutal, it is also strangely matter-of-fact: the soldier's face flies away; his head disappears;his body continues mechanically on. There is even an element of lyricism, wistfully ironized,in the descriptionof the soldier'sheadless and heedless persistence,a gallantrysummonedup by the "energyand grace"of his body's inertialindomitability-a biological heroism, if you will. And the effect of the whole of this complex stylistic display-of this complicatedconjoining of brutality, aestheticism, and lyricism-is a profound poignancy, which underscores the poignancy inherentin the scene Morrisondescribes.Whatcould be more moving, after all, than this spectacle of a living death, this image of the living on of the already dead, which offers itself to us as a painful point of identification, which proffers itself as an unsentimental display of the death that we ourselves harbor, that we are alreadyin some sense enwhile we read? during, The passage is paradigmatic, a distillation of the novel's interests, its methods, and its aims. Brutalityin Sula, for example, althoughrarely the focus of critical inquiry,is endemic and pervasive, the text's most persistent preoccupation.1Indeed, the novel is an almost uninterrupted registering of violence, of violation, of destruction and selfdestruction, played out in the form of addiction and alcoholism, self-mutilation,murder,and mass suicide. But as in the account of the anonymous soldier's spectacular dying, brutality is a feature not simply of the history the novel narrates.It is a featureof the narration itself-an aspect of the language, of the composition of individual scenes, a matterof details:the bloodstainedwater,for example, that Eva finds in Plum's bedroom and that she mistakes for a glass of strawberrycrush (46); the steam arisingfrom Hannah'scharredbody, "seared to sealing" by the water used to douse the flames that had engulfed her (76); "the scrap of flesh, like a button mushroom,"that had once been the tip of Sula's finger, "curlingin the cherry blood that ran into the cornerof the slate" (54). There is a luxuriousness in this lingering over the graphic,a luxuriating in pain that makes the novel both consistently compelling and very difficult to read. And this at-

tentiveness to violence and suffering is so thoroughly interwoven into the fabric of Morrison's text thatit markseven the quietestmoments: Evalistenedto the [ice] wagoncomingandthought She about whatit mustbe likein theicehouse. leaned backa little andclosedhereyes tryingto see the inin sidesof the icehouse.It was a dark,lovelypicture
this heat, until it remindedher of that winter night in the outhouse [...]. Even now on the hottest day anyone in Medallion could remember-a day so hot flies slept and cats were splaying theirfur like quills, a day so hot pregnant wives leaned up against trees and cried, and women remembering some three-month-

old hurtputground glassin theirlovers'foodandthe if men looked at the food and wondered therewas
glass in it and ate it anyway because it was too hot to

resisteatingit-even on thishottest daysin thehot of fromthebitingcold andstench of spell,Evashivered thatouthouse. (70-71) The context is Eva's memoryof the night she saved her then infant son from near-fatalconstipation-a brutal enough scene in its own right. But what is most strikinghere is the seemingly inevitabledrift of the passage from lyricism to violence, the way a poetic attention to sleeping flies and quill-like fur gives way to an awareness of embittered women salting theirlovers' dinnerswith groundglass. Most obviously, however,Sula's attentivenessto violence is expressed in terms of its abiding interest in death. The anonymous soldier is, after all, only the first in a long series of figures whose dying Sula records. As Maureen T. Reddy points out, "Each of the [novel's] ten major chapters includes a death,"and while some of these deathsare most are "actual"(29). Chicken Lit"metaphoric," tle, Plum, Hannah, Sula, Tar Baby, Mrs. Jackson, the threedeweys: all these characters duringthe die shorthistory the narrativetells. Indeed, one would be hard-pressed, I think, to find a novel in which deathfiguresmore prominently. Some charactersfor example, Chicken Little-exhaust their entire function in dying. Death not only structures the narrativebut also governs it, determinesthe elaboration of characterand event. Death presides. And Sula endlessly presidesover death. Almost all the deaths the novel records, moreover, are-like that of the unknown soldier-

186

"Circles Circles Sorrow". the WakeofMorrison's and In Sula of

reported as witnessed, are represented in the form, that is, of a bearing witness. Chicken Little's drowning, for example, is watched by Sula and Nel ("They expected him to come up laughing. Both girls stared at the water") and perhaps by Shadrack as well ("Nel spoke first. 'Somebody saw.' A figure appeared briefly on the opposite shore. The only house over there was Shadrack's. [...] Had he seen?" [61]). And when Hannah burns, we see the event through, first, Eva's eyes, then Mr. and Mrs. Suggs's: Before she trundledher wagon over to the dresser to get her comb, Eva looked out the window and saw Hannahbending to light the yard fire. [.. .] She rolled up to the window and it was then she saw Hannah burning. The flames from the yard fire were licking the blue cotton dress, making her dance. [...] Hannah, her senses lost, went flying out of the yard gesturingand bobbing like a sprungjack-in-the-box. Mr. and Mrs. Suggs, who had set up their canning in apparatus theirfrontyard, saw her running,dancing towardthem. They whispered, "Jesus,Jesus,"and together hoisted up their tub of water [. . .] and threwit on the smoke-and-flame-bound woman. The waterdid put out the flames, but it also made steam, which searedto sealing all thatwas left of the beautifulHannah Peace. She lay there on the wooden sidewalk planks, twitching lightly [.. .], her face a mask of agony so intense that for years the people who gathered 'round would shake their heads at the recollection of it. (75-76) Sula too attends this agonizing spectacle, watching on with typical aesthetic disengagement as her mother burns: "Sula [.. .] watched Hannah burn," Eva thinks to herself, "not because she was paralyzed, but because she was interested" (78). The disinterested interest in the spectacle of death that Sula manifests here ultimately extends to include even her own experience in dying: While in this state of weary anticipation,[Sula] noticed that she was not breathing, that her heart had stopped completely. A crease of fear touched her breast, for any second there was sure to be a violent explosion in her brain, a gasping for breath.Then she realized, or rathershe sensed, thattherewas not going to be any pain. She was not breathing because she

didn't have to. Her body did not need oxygen. She was dead. Sula felt her face smiling. "Well, I'll be damned," she thought,"it didn'teven hurt.Wait'llI tell Nel." (149) What this bemused postmortem meditation indicates most clearly-aside from the depth of Sula's love for and dependence on Nel-is the extent to which the representation of death in this novel is associated with observation; for even here, when there are no witnesses to watch over the dying, the event still registers as spectacle. By way of beginning an explanation of what I see as the significance of this thematic of witnessed dying, I want to examine a related concern-the novel's engagement with time. The relation between these two points is integral and in a sense fairly obvious. But Sula's interest in time, in the transitoriness of experience that the fact of mortality dramatically epitomizes, has a distinctly communal bearing. In general terms, Sula frames a representation of the passing itself-literally-as of a concretely imagined African American community: "In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighborhood. It stood in the hills above the valley town of Medallion and spread all the way to the river. It is called the suburbs now, but when black people lived there it was called the Bottom" (3). The elegiac tone of this evocation of place is unmistakable, but the passage is deceptively complex. On the one hand, this opening gesture is designed to frame the narration-spatially, of course, but temporally as well: it locates the story within time, within the general context of time's passing. Here, in this place, the novel's prologue informs us, a story has taken place. Or, given the nebulous future perfect the prologue evokes: there, in that place, a history will have occurred. On the other hand, the prologue also suggests-in its fairy-tale-like cadence-a defiance of time, a desire to situate the novel's tale in the timeless realm of parable or myth: "In that place [. . .] there was once a neighborhood." What is odd about this opening of (or onto) a mythic, atemporal temporality is that it is articu-

PhillipNovak

187

lated entirely in terms of a closure, or foreclosure-that it projects the novel's story, its history, the time of its narration,as the marking of a loss: "In that place [...] there was once a neighborhood." As Houston Baker notes, this is definition by "negation"(237), the opening of a void. To the extent that the story unfolds, it unfolds within absence, in the form of an absence: The beechesaregone now,andso arethe peartrees wherechildren andyelleddownthrough blossat the soms to passersby. [...] They aregoing to razethe Time and a Half Pool Hall, wherefeet in long tan shoes once pointeddownfromchairrungs.A steel ballwill knockto dustIrene's Palace Cosmetology, of wherewomenusedto lean theirheadsbackon sink Nu traysanddozewhileIrenelathered Nile intotheir hair.Men in khakiworkclothes will pry loose the slatsof Reba'sGrill,wherethe ownercookedin her hat becauseshe couldn'tremember ingredients the without it. (3) These ghosts will rise again during the course of the narrative is to follow. But theirreturnis dethat termined in advance as a haunting. For all that is evoked here, from the moment of its emergence,is missing or vanishing-is always, in some sense, already gone. The first of the specters summoned from (or into) this temporal abyss is Shadrack, whose advent in the narrative signals the splintering of mythic time and the opening of history proper: "1919," the chapter heading announces. The date situates the narrative'sengagement with history at a moment of historical crisis. If the mythic time of the novel's beginning is shattered,in chapter 1, by the emergenceof history,history is itself presented as shattered, by the cataclysm of the First World War.This image of the war and of the culturaldiscontinuity it represents-as well as the use of a shell-shocked veteranas a registerof that discontinuity-is a modernistconvention.Morrisonworks, and works with, this convention,using it as a shorthand for the impact of Westernhistory on African Americanculture.As Susan Willis suggests, Shadrack's of is experience bodilyfragmentation the social uppsychologicalequivalentof annihilating to heaval,whichhe was subjected as an armydraftee

(the armybeing the firstof capitalism'smodem industrial machines to incorporateblack men). Shadrack's imaginedphysical deformityis a figurefor the equally monstrous psychological and social transformations that capitalism in all its modes (slavery, the military, and wage labor)has inflicted on the minds and bodies of black people. (321) Shadrack thus presents the inception of history in the narrative as a form of dislocation, of fragmentation and incoherence. And while there are moments of cohesiveness in the novel, the text never strays far from its initial, its initiating, conception of the historical. Within historical time, within the space of the novel's narration, families disintegrate, people die, relationships break down, communities disappear. This image of historical disruption, of the disruptiveness of history, culminates in the novel's epilogue, where the ghosts the narrative has raised are once again laid to rest: [T]he Bottom had collapsed. Everybody who had made money during the war moved as close as they could to the valley, and the white people were buying down river,cross river, stretchingMedallion like two strings on the banks. Nobody colored lived much up in the Bottom any more. White people were building towers for television stationsup there and there was a rumorabout a golf course or something.Anyway, hill land was more valuable now, and those black people who had moved down right after the war and in the fifties couldn't afford to come back even if they wanted to. Except for the few blacks still huddled by the river bend, and some undemolished houses on Road, only rich white folks were building Carpenter's homes in the hills. Just like that, they had changed their minds and instead of keeping the valley floor to themselves, now they wanted a hilltop house with a riverview and a ring of elms. The black people, for all their new look, seemed awfully anxious to get to the valley, or leave town, and abandon the hills to whoever was interested. It was sad, because the Bottom had been a real place. These young ones kept talking about the community, but they left the hills to the poor, the old, the stubborn-and the rich white folks. Maybe it hadn't been a community,but it had been a place. Now there weren't any places left, just separate houses with separate televisions and separate telephones and less and less droppingby. (165-66)

188

and "Circles Circles Sorrow". the WakeofMorrison's In Sula of

This re-presentationof the Bottom's dissolution is focused, or focalized (Genette 189-98), through Nel-thus, told in free indirect discourse. But the usual poles of that relation are here strangely reversed, for it is Nel here who is doing the mimicking. At the novel's conclusion, the text reappropriates-reclaims on behalf of the neighborhood, throughNel-the elegiac tone with which it began. The difference here is that, in addition to being steeped in a generalizedsense of time's passing, the narrationis now thoroughlyrooted in historical time: "1965," as the chapter heading informs us-"the year,"Reddy observes, "thatsaw the assassination of Malcolm X [. . .] the year that Wattsburned"(43). The increasedhistoricalparticularity of this replaying of the "collapse" of the Bottom is markedin other ways as well, for Nel's reflections at the close of the novel identify-in ways that the prologue does not-the specific economic and social processes involved in the production of the text's central absence: the changing structureof the nation's economy redefines property values and with them the landscape.The postwar industrial boom leads wealthier blacks away from the Bottom, to occupy the valley land that was originally denied them. At the same time, the increasing suburbanizationof the culture and the consequentcollapse of city centerslead wealthier whites out of the valley and up into the hills, where their progressively monadic lives can include "a view." The values that had held the Bottom together, its ability to accept eccentricity and evil, to find a place for everyone-the mad, the mean-spirited, the decrepit included-begin to breakdown. And the neighborhooddisperses, disappearsinto the drift of the dominantculture,continues to exist only in reified form, as part of a generalizedAfricanAmerican"community." The conclusion of the novel thus replays its beginning, recasting the story in less mythic terms. The effect, however, remains the same: "In that
place [. ..] there was once a neighborhood"; "the

Bottom had collapsed." Between these two points, a history will have been recorded, but nothing, in essence, will have occurred. The narrative sinks within the margins, between the two markings, of its absence; it situates itself within the loss it creates.2 Moreover, because the second of these two

moments of markeddissolution precedes the first it (if only by a hairbreadth),3 creates a loop in, or of, the narration, leads the text (and the reader) back out of history-to that mythic evocation of original and originating loss. "Nothing will come of nothing,"Lear says to Cordelia:"Speakagain." This looping, this enclosing of the text between the two markingsof its disappearance, this enfolding of the story withinabsence, definesthe novel as a continuous presiding over loss. The particular form of Sula's recursive "development,"in other words, determinesthe narrativeas a kind of ongoing wake, an interminablevigil-the terminological turn here returningus, of course, to the theme of witnessed dying. "My work,"Morrisonhas said, "bearswitness"("'Language'"371). And although she tends to describethis aspect or aim of her writing in terms of a testifying to "whatis"-in terms, that is, of a more or less violent confrontationwith the actual(the historicalconditions,for instance,in which African Americans have lived)-she also consistently relates the actual and the ephemeral: "you have to bear witness to what is. The fear of collapse, of meaninglessness, of disorder,of anarchy-there's a certain protection that art can provide in the guise, not even of truth,but just a kind of linguistic shape of a life or a group of lives" ("Conversation" 273). On the surface, the comment constitutesa fairly straightforward reformulation of the conventional notion that art, as Robert Frost put it, provides "a momentary stay against confusion" (777). But the series of (often conflictual)juxtapositionsin Morrison'sremarkalso suggests not only the extent to which she associates being and evanescencebut also the extent to which she sees her work as both aligned with and resistant to the evanescent real. On the one hand, the actual-the "what is," the present-requires witnessing only because it is predicatedon the possibility of loss. To bear witness to what is involves engaging, even embracing, evanescence. On the other hand, the act of bearing witness, Morrison here suggests, is calculated to compensate for the passing of the present, to provide some protection from the threat of impermanence. Sula satisfies both these demands: in situating itself within absence, in producing itself as absence, the novel at once affirmschange and laments loss. Since being

PhillipNovak

189

bears a fundamentalrelationto dying, bearingwitness to what is becomes commemoration.Writing, in short,bears witness to death. Such a bearing witness requires, Morrison suggests, a certaindisinterest,for the deathwe witness whenever we bear witness to death is always in some sense our own. Although the point is implicit, I think, in all the scenes of witnessed dying the novel records,it is explicit in the descriptionof Chicken Little's funeral,the second and most fully presented of the three significant funerals that punctuatethe movementof Morrison'stext:

As the above formulation suggests, mourning for Morrison is more thanjust a means of paying homage to the dead. It is a way of being, an orientation towardsurvival,a celebrationof living on in short, a wake, a cultivated wakefulness to the poignancy of the present moment in its passing. And as the novel's structureattests, such wakefulness should be, ideally, continuous: Sula argues, that is, for the sustaining of grief. This attentiveness to dying, this living within or within sight of death, this acknowledgingof the absence inscribed in presence, serves primarily (and more or less conventionally) to highlight the value of the present, which is preciousbecause it is fragile, because As Reverend moved his sermon, hands Deal into the of it is always already marked by (and for) loss-a the womenunfolded pairsof raven'swingsand like flewhighabovetheirhatsin theair.Theydidnothear point Morrison makes perhaps most succinctly in all of whathe said;theyheard oneword, phrase, the dedication of the novel: "It is sheer good forthe or orinflection wasforthemtheconnection that between tune to miss somebody before they leave you. This the eventandthemselves. some it was the term book is for Ford and Slade, whom I miss although For they have not left me." There is nothing especially "Sweet Jesus." AndtheysawtheLamb's andthe eye innocent victim: themselves. truly Theyacknowledged striking or novel about the idea Morrison articutheinnocent childhidingin thecorer of theirhearts, lates in this dedication. But missing the present in its presence is not simply, or even primarily,a sensandwich. Thatone. The holdinga sugar-and-butter onewholodgeddeepin their thin,old,youngskin, timent Sula expresses; it is a process the narrative fat, andwastheonetheworld hurt. had (65) systematicallyseeks to enact. I have already spoken of the text's attempt to To acknowledge death at all is to acknowledge present itself in the form of an absence. And this attemptdefines the generaloutlines of the process I one's own death, the death that one harbors as a have in mind here. But absence informs the narracondition of existence. Mourning, in this sense, is tive in a host of other ways. As Robert Granthas always proleptic, a kind of impossible anticipaput the point, "In Sula there are 'missing' subjects tion-an internalized projection-of the experi([.... ] on severallevels) and objects (e.g., Eva's leg ence of one's own loss. For a moment, for the and, later, her comb); absent persons are 'missed' duration of our grieving, we live our own dying; (ChickenLittle, Jude,Ajax, and Sula); and missing we witness, or bear witness to, our own inevitable persons are evoked in the memory through [the] dissolution. objects" with which they are associated (96). The Such a conception of grieving is neither nihilisnarrative itself, moreover, is punctuated by abtic nor narcissistic. Indeed, such solipsism, Sula sence: it withholds,for example, the story of Eva's suggests, is the condition of possibility for engagelost leg, just as it withholdsthe historyof Sula's ten ment with others, for sympathy.4 The only way the years of living away from the Bottom. Lost limbs, women can truly bear witgrieving neighborhood lost lives, lost opportunities,lost histories:the text ness to Chicken Little's passing, for example, is by is woven of these missing threads. bearing witness to their own. At no point is MorThe centrality of absence to Morrison's novel rison critical of this self-absorption, this approhas long been recognized. And most critics who address the issue-myself included-see the priation of another's death. Such is the nature of identification, Morrison insists. Such is the paratext's preoccupation with absence as allied to its dox of grief: we most honor the dead by attending notorious indeterminacy.Grantobserves, "Morrito the deathinscribedwithin our own living on. son's novel is a prime 'postmodernist' text; its

190

"Circles Circles Sorrow". the WakeofMorrison's and In Sula of

difficulties are a function of Morriinterpretational son's calculatedindeterminacies.The questions we labor over have less to do with verbal-rhetorical 'strangeness' incorporated,or hybridized, into the text [. . .] than with what had been deliberatelyleft out of the text" (94). Philip Page, citing Barbara Rigney, echoes Grant'sconclusions: "theemphasis on absence, ambiguity,multiple perspectives, and fragmentation [in Sula] creates a novel that, 'like all of Morrison's works, subvertsconcepts of textual unity and defies totalized interpretation"' (65; Rigney 32). For Page, as the citation from Rigney makes clear, the absences Sula relentlessly produces, like the ambiguityit systematicallycultivates, function primarilyas a form of resistance,of rebellion,as an "attackon traditional,white-imposedconceptions" (64). While Grantinsists at the outset of his essay that Sula refuses the fixity of place entailed by a notion of simple opposition, he nonetheless describes the novel as "rebellious"and "revisionary" (91) and concludes his discussion emphasizingthe oppositional and liberatory potential implicit in Sula's indeterminacy: Sula, Toni Morrisonpre"In sents and confronts the readerwith a text in which the perspectivismof memory and phenomenological perception-and interpretation-are in the foreground, and in which the necessary negations and 'absences' of the text both enlarge the black female hero and deconstruct the expectation of politicized 'determinacy"'(101-02). DeborahMcDowell, less tentative, makes essentially the same point: "Sula [. . .] is rife with liberating possibilities in that it transgresses all deterministic structures of opposition. [. . .] The novel invokes oppositions of good/evil, virgin/whore, self/other, but moves beyond them, avoiding the false choices they imply and dictate. [.. .] The narrativeinsistently blurs and confuses these and other binary oppositions. It glories in paradox and ambiguity" (79-80).5 The drift of such inquiry towarddeconstruction is obvious enough.6In a sense, it is inevitable, for Sula does operate, at some level, just as these critics suggest-by simultaneously elaborating and unravelinga sequence of binaryoppositionsand by thus creating, throughthe slippage such a process entails, a multiplicityof gaps or fissuresin the text.

To the extent, however, that deconstructive intervention seeks not to annihilate but to dislocate meaning-to the extent that the processes of deconstructionmove towarda proliferationof possibilities ratherthan towardimpoverishment,destitution-reading Sula as a deconstructive text seems not so much inappropriateas inadequate. Frequentlyenough, the gaps Sula opens up fail to generate meaning. Shadrack,for example, returning from the war, locates himself-is located for the reader-in the form of insistentnegation: not Twenty-two yearsold, weak,hot,frightened, darthe ing to acknowledge factthathe didn'tevenknow whoor whathe was ... withno past,no language, no no no tribe, source, address book,no comb,no pencil, no clock,no pockethandkerchief, rug,no bed,no no canopener, fadedpostcard, soap,no key,no tono no baccopouch,no soiledunderwear nothing and nothing nothingto do ... he was sureof one thingonly: theunchecked of monstrosity his hands. (12;ellipsesin orig.) Out of this vacuum, no meaning arises: meaning here does not circulate,does not open oppositional possibilities; meaning here does not play. Instead, we are confronted with a catalog of what Patricia McKee, in a persuasive,indeed moving, accountof spacingin Sula, refersto as "deadlosses" (48-51).7 And it is not enough to argue,as Grant,McDowell, and Page do, that such losses are in some sense compensated by the reader's active "participation in the creation of meaning in the text" (McDowell 87). At one level, Sula's interstitialstructure-what McDowell refers to as "[t]he novel's fragmentary, episodic, elliptical quality" (87)-is designed to invite readerly engagement. To the extent, however, that this sort of reader-response-oriented approach to the novel imagines the "gaps in the text" (McDowell 87) as destined to be filled,8 it is self-defeating, for it effectively posits a limit to the very open-endedness it seeks to explain and valorize. Which is to say simply that some absences are just absences and must be reckoned as such. Morrisontold RobertStepto, for example, "I wantedSula to be missed by the reader.That'swhy she dies early. There's a lot of book after she dies, you know. I wanted them to miss her presence in

PhillipNovak

191

that book as that town missed her presence"("'Intimate Things'" 383). Such an absence is not an No opening or opportunity. amountof creativeparticipationby the readercan or should fill this void. Such an absence, such a loss, can only be experiit enced; or, perhapsmore appropriate, can only be endured. This is the point, I take it, of the novel's elliptical-that is to say, open-ended-conclusion: Nel Her and Suddenly stopped. eye twitched burned a little. "Sula?" whispered, she gazingat the topsof trees.
"Sula?"[. . .]

"Allthattime,all thattime,I thought wasmissing I Jude."And the loss presseddownon her chest and cameup intoherthroat. "Wewas girlstogether," she said as though explainingsomething."Oh Lord, she Sula," cried,"girl, girlgirlgirl." girl, It wasa finecry-loud andlong-but it hadno bottomandit hadno top,justcircles circles sorrow. and of (174) As Morrison's comments in the interview with Stepto and the epigraph to the novel make clear, Nel's experience of Sula's loss is designed to be On paradigmatic. the most basic level, it serves as a model for the reader's relation to Sula and to the vanishingromanticindividualismshe represents.In this sense, the novel is a paean to inventiveness, self-assertion,and risky idiosyncracyin the context of a culturalmomentdefinedat the narrative's conclusion as increasingly homogeneous. On another level, Nel's circling sorrowmodels the reader'srelation to the whole of the Bottom community, whose distinctiveness Sula paradoxically symbolizes. To grieve for Sula-to "miss" her, in Morrison's term-is thus to grieve for an African American cultural past the novel, from its inceplost. Such grievingcan tion, imaginesas irrevocably never be completely worked through. And Sula strives at every narrativelevel-in the elaboration of individualimages, in the developmentof characters and their relations, in the articulation of the novel's basic structure-not simply to represent this limitless sense of loss but also somehow to effect it. The felt experience of a ceaselessly circulating mourning is what the narrativeseeks-to borrow from anotherof Morrison'snovels-"to pass on."

This effort might best be understoodas directed at creatingand promulgatinga specifically African American historical understanding-a conception of history groundedin the discontinuities and disruptions,the traumas,of AfricanAmericancultural experience. The novel, as I have said, images the advent of history in precisely these terms. And Sula seeks in its unfoldingto establisha relationto historicaltraumathatpartakesof the sacred.As the novel develops, historical awareness becomes a form of ritualizedattention,a keening, that continuously imbues contemporary experience with an awed appreciation of the losses necessarily produced by the passage of time. Given the nature of the forces impinging on African American cultural continuity and given that these forces are still largely in operation,there is, it seems to me, an ethical dimension to this desire of Morrison's to make meaning of melancholia. Convention has it that grieving must be sacrificed in the interest of getting on with living. But such a model for mourning, Sula suggests, may be inadequate to a situation in which the losses endured are cultural as well as individual, public as well as private. Because African American culture is still at risk, getting done with grieving might well constitute a surrenderto the forces thatproducedthe losses in the firstplace. Thus the limitless sorrow Morrisonidentifies as the culmination of Nel's experience and that she strives throughout the novel to make part of the reader's is pitched against the process of cultural absorptionSula records in its concluding chapter. To cultivate mourningis to attendto history and at the same time to resist the historical trajectory leading towardthe extinction of African American cultural identity. Morrison's efforts to transform mourninginto melancholiaareparadoxicallytherapeutic. As I remarkedregarding the processes of grief as Morrisonmaps them in more personalcontexts in the novel, such a transformationis aimed not only at paying tributeto the past but also at securing the present.Just as the mournersat Chicken Little's funeralcelebratetheir own ephemerallives by markinghis death, Morrisoncelebratesthe precariouspersistenceof African Americancultureby constructinga memorialto the losses that that culturehas endured.Again, what Morrisongives us in

192

and In ' "Circles Circles Sorrow": the WakeofMorrison Sula of

Sula is an ongoing wake, a ceaseless celebrationof African American culture born of an acute sensitivity to the culture'scontinuingfragility.

Notes
'One of the few essays thatexamines Sula's aestheticizedviolence is BarbaraJohnson's "'Aesthetic' and 'Rapport' in Toni Morrison'sSula."Johnsonsees the novel as openingthe question of the relationbetween disinterestedcontemplationand "thedynamics of connectedness"(170): "The novel presents us with a series of horribleimages, painful truths,excruciatinglosses. Do we just sit back and watch?What is the natureof our pleasurein contemplating trauma?What would be a response that would embody rapportratherthan aesthetics?Is this what Toni Morrison is challenging us to consider? Or is she merely trying to make us less innocentin our contemplation, analysis,our 'inour terest'?" (171). Raising such questions seems to me too one of the novel's aims. The bruntof my argument, however,is thatSula seeks also-by representing violence as simultaneouslyspectacular(in both senses of the word) and unremarkable, negotiatby ing between interest and disinterest, empathy and apathy-to open a space for an imaginativeengagementwith what is, effecthe tively, unimaginable: experienceof sheerloss. 2WhatGrantrefers to as the "quasipalindromic design of the novel" (95), the way it tracesits way from its centerto its beginning, underscoresthe extent to which the text presents itself as an absentingof itself. See also Page 63. 3Morrison mentionedin at least threedifferentinterviews has that "Sula started with Shadrack"("One"83)-that she wrote what is now the prologue as the narrativewas nearingcompletion (see also "Seams" 32 and "Toni Morrison" [Ruas] 101). Thus, in orderof composition, the concluding evocation of loss precedesthe first.But the latterprecedesthe formerin the sense thatthe distanced,third-person meditationon the collapse of the Bottom is one degree removed from Nel's personal experience of loss. The view provided by the prologue encompasses the perspectiveNel offers in the novel's concludingchapter. 4Cf. Derrida76: "The death of the other thus becomes again 'first,' always first.It is like the experience of mourningthatinstitutes my relation to myself and constitutes the egoity of the ego. [.. .] The deathof the other,this deathof the otherin 'me,' is fundamentally the only death that is named by the syntagm 'my death,' with all the consequences that one can draw from this. This is another dimension of awaiting [s'attendre] as awaiting one another[s'attendre l'un l'autre], awaiting oneself at death and expecting death [s'attendresoi-memea la mort]by awaiting one another [s'attendre l'un l'autre], up to the most advancedlongevity in a life that will have been so short,no matter what"(Frenchinterpolationsin orig.). Derridanicely teases out here the relationsbetween solipsism and sympathyI am trying to locate in this passage in Sula.

Given my resistanceto readingSula as a deconstructivetext, this citationmust seem incongruous.Ultimately,I thinkit is not. In my brief discussion of deconstructionand its applicabilityto Sula, I invoke what I assume to be a consensus position concerning the meaning and value of the concept. That this position-which defines deconstruction as a form of subversive play-represents a very partial reading of Derrida's work is a point I can only allude to here. Suffice it to say that on my reading, the Derridean text, written in the wake of the Holocaust, has much to do with the processes of grieving. 5I present this critical pastiche in partto suggest that a loose consensus has begun to develop from-or, perhaps more apt, has begun to line up with a perspective adumbratedby-Hortense Spillers's fine insight that "[n]o Manichean analysis demandinga polarityof interest-black/white, male/female,good/ bad-will work"to draw meaning from Sula's story (213). On the one hand,given the arrayof forces impingingon women'sparticularlyAfrican American women's-freedom, Sula's experimental openness to experience models resistance, as Spillers suggests. And it is not my aim to downplay either the value of such resistance or the importanceof readingthe novel in these terms. On the otherhand,the conceptualframework offered by the idea of subversion does not encompass the full range of interpretivepossibilities in Sula, as I hope to show in what follows. Ultimately, I think the novel calls on us, not to evaluateSula, but somehow to experiencethe frighteningopenness-and emptiness-that she represents.Those less sanguine than Spillers in their assessment of Sula's eccentricity include Guth (esp. 576-77) and Reddy.It should be noted that although Spillers is clear about what she sees Sula as fighting againstthe limitations that have historically been placed on black female being-she remains guarded in her claims concerning what, aside from sheer openness, the novel might be fighting for, the particular possibilities that Sula opens up. See esp. 233: "If we identify Sula as a kind of countermythology, are saywe ing that she is no longer boundby a rigid patternof predictions, predilections,and anticipations.Even though she is a character in a novel, her strategic place as potential being might argue that subversionitself-law breaking-is an aspect of liberation that women must confrontfrom its various angles, in its different guises. Sula's outlawry may not be the best kind, but that she has the will towardrebellionitself is the stunningidea." 6Atthe outsetof his essay, Page, arguingthatin Sula "Morrison becomes overtlydeconstructive" (60), makes the case explicit. McKee's essay came to my attentiononly re7Unfortunately, cently, afterthis essay was acceptedfor publication.It deserves closer attentionthanI can give it here. ThatMcKee elaboratesa position similar to mine should be clear from the following extract:"Morrisondepicts African American,historicalexperiences of loss rather than identifying loss, from a poststructuralistperspective, as a necessary and nonindividualized component of experience. In African-Americanlife Morrison identifies both material losses-missing persons, and parts of persons-and nonmateriallosses-lost relations,lost possibilities-whose absence is historically significant. To miss these 'things' that never were is to locate historical significance in nonmaterialas well as materialexperience and to insist, more-

Phillip Novak

193

over, that the historical experience of loss extends far beyond materialsuffering"(59). The thrustof McKee's argumentis that Morrison'snovel seeks to force a confrontationwith the losses that have markedAfrican Americanexperience and to insist on Her analysis seems to me to leave their historical particularity. open the question of where we are left in the wake of such a confrontation.How do we orient ourselves, how does the novel work to effect an orientation, toward the recognition of such losses? Attempting an answer to this question is the primary aim of my essay. 8A few extracts from Grant will help clarify what I mean: "Sula in form and content is 'about' gaps, lacks, 'missing' subjects, and ambiguous psychic space, all of which must be 'filled' and interpreted the reader;further,the narrativeconby tent and technique are complementaryin their appreciationof how the devices of memory 'create' presence out of absence" (94); "In Sula there are 'missing' subjects [...]; absentpersons are 'missed' [...]; and missing persons are evoked in the memory through objects [... ]. [. . . A]ll these lacks become the sources of figurativefulfillment throughmemory and/orimaginative projection. [. .. I]ndeterminacy becomes the site for fable-building"(96). Thus, on Grant'saccount, for the characters in the novel, memory and imaginationcompensatefor loss; for the readers of the novel, imaginative projection fills narrative gaps. In my view, Morrisonclaims the opposite: a comfortable resolution of grief by means of an appeal to the idea that the dead somehow persist in the memory of the living is sometimes a betrayal;an equally comfortable resolution of narratological indeterminacies by means of an appeal to the reader's creative participation in meaning making is sometimes an attempt at exercising unduecontrol.

WorksCited
Baker, Houston A., Jr. "When Lindbergh Sleeps with Bessie Smith: The Writing of Place in Sula." Gates and Appiah 236-60. Derrida, Jacques. Aporias. Trans. Thomas Dutoit. Stanford: StanfordUP, 1993. Frost, Robert. "The Figure a Poem Makes." Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays. New York:Lib. of Amer., 1995. 776-78. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.,and K. A. Appiah, eds. ToniMorrison. Critical PerspectivesPast and Present. New York:Armistad, 1993.

Genette, Gerard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Trans.JaneE. Lewin. Ithaca:CornellUP, 1972. Grant, Robert. "Absence into Presence: The Thematics of Memory and 'Missing' Subjectsin Toni Morrison'sSula." McKay 90-103. Guth, Deborah. "A Blessing and a Burden:The Relation to the Past in Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved."ModernFiction Studies39 (1993): 575-95. Johnson, Barbara."'Aesthetic' and 'Rapport' in Toni Morrison's Sula." Textual Practice 7 (1993): 165-72. McDowell, DeborahE. "'The Self and the Other':ReadingToni Morrison's Sula and the Black Female Text." McKay 77-90. McKay, Nellie Y., ed. Critical Essays on Toni Morrison. Boston: Hall, 1988. McKee, Patricia. "Spacing and Placing Experience in Toni Morrison'sSula." ToniMorrison. Critical and Theoretical Approaches.Ed. Nancy J. Peterson.Baltimore:JohnsHopkins UP, 1997. 37-62. Morrison, Toni. "A Conversation with Toni Morrison."Inter262-74. view with Bill Moyers. Taylor-Guthrie . "'IntimateThings in Place': A Conversationwith Toni Morrison." Interviewwith RobertB. Stepto. Gates and Appiah 378-95. . "'The Language Must Not Sweat': A Conversation with Toni Morrison." Interview with Thomas Leclair. Gates and Appiah369-77. - . "TheOne out of Sequence."Interviewwith Anne Koenen. Taylor-Guthrie 67-83. . "TheSeams Can'tShow: An Interviewwith ToniMorrison."Interviewwith JaneBakerman. 30-42. Taylor-Guthrie Sula. New York:Plume, 1973. ---. - . "ToniMorrison."Interviewwith CharlesRuas. TaylorGuthrie93-118. Page, Philip. Dangerous Freedom: Fusion and Fragmentation in Toni Morrison's Novels. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1995. Reddy, Maureen T. "The Tripled Plot and Center of Sula." BlackAmericanLiterature Forum22 (1988): 29-45. Rigney, BarbaraHill. The Voices of ToniMorrison. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1991. Spillers, Hortense J. "A Hateful Passion, A Lost Love." Gates and Appiah210-35. Taylor-Guthrie, Danielle, ed. Conversations with Toni Morrison. Jackson:UP of Mississippi, 1994. Willis, Susan. "Eruptionsof Funk: Historicizing Toni Morrison." Gates and Appiah308-29.