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Form Matters: Toni Morrison's "Sula" and the Ethics of Narrative

Author(s): Axel Nissen and Toni Morrison
Source: Contemporary Literature, Vol. 40, No. 2 (Summer, 1999), pp. 263-285
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press
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 AXEL NISSEN
FormMatters:
SulaandtheEthicsof Narrative
ToniMorrison's

"T~ he
of
last decadehas seen a renewalof interestin the "ethics
in the in which narrative and
fiction," ways poses at-
tempts to answer questions about how best to live in the
world. This interest has been shared by philosophers as
well as literarycritics.In her collection of essays Love'sKnowledge,the
neo-Aristotelian philosopher and classicist Martha C. Nussbaum
stresses the significance of literary texts in arguing for "a conception
of ethical understanding that involves emotional as well as intellec-
tual activity" (ix). Nussbaum is currently one of the most prominent
promulgators of "philosophy through literature,"in which "a theme
that is also the objectof philosophical deliberationis given literaryin-
terpretationin terms of an imaginary world artisticallyconstructed"
(Lamarqueand Olsen 391). In his 1995 study NarrativeEthics,Adam
Zachary Newton is equally concerned with the philosophical status
of fiction, though his context is mainly Levinas, not Aristotle. Among
literary critics, on the other hand, we find the old-timer and formal-
ist Wayne C. Booth, who suggests in TheCompanyWeKeepthat "there
are many legitimate paths open to anyone who decides to abandon,
at least for a time, the notion that an interest in form precludes an in-
terest in the ethical powers of form" (6-7).
The emphasis on the significance of form has been a recurringas-
pect of the renewed interestin the ethical aspects of fiction. Booth em-
phasizes that a writer's "choice of devices and compositional strate-
gies is from the beginning a choice of ethos, an invitation to one kind
of ethical criticism"(108). In Nussbaum's words: "Style itself makes
its claims, expresses its own sense of what matters.Literaryform is not

Contemporary LiteratureXL,2 0010-7484/99/0002-0263 $1.50

? 1999 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

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 264 * C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R AT U R E

separablefrom philosophical content,but is, itself, a part of content-

an integral part, then, of the searchfor and the statement of truth"(3).
Yet Nussbaum and other philosophers-turned-literarycritics such as
Hilary Putnam have been criticizedfor being too little concerned with
"literatureas a separate and independent practicedefined by its own
logic and its own constraintsand conventions" (Lamarqueand Olsen
397). Nussbaum herself admits, "Weneed to pursue in much greater
depth and detail the stylistic portion of my argument, saying a great
deal more, in connection with many more authors and many different
genres and styles, about the practicaland human expressive content
of structuralchoices at all levels of specificity"(186).
It is the aim of this essay to pursue just such an inquiry in relationto
one specific novel by Toni Morrison. Sulais centrally concerned with
questions of right and wrong in interpersonalrelationshipsforged by
bonds of kinship, marriage,and, not least of all, friendship.What does
it mean to be good? What is evil? What does it mean to be a friend?
What is love? How might we learn from each other?Because Sulais a
novel and not a treatise,potential answers to these questions await the
readerin the form of characterand situation ratherthan explicit philo-
sophical argument. Not only that, because Sula is the kind of experi-
mental, complex, writerly narrativewe often call modernist, the de-
mands on the readeras interpreterand judge are more extensive than
those made by, say, one of the Grimm fairy tales or a Dickens novel.
Deborah E. McDowell has given us a telling description of the
work involved in reading Sula:

Thenovel's fragmentary,episodic,ellipticalqualityhelps to thwarttextual

unity,to preventa totalizedinterpretation.An earlyreviewerdescribedthe
text as a series of scenes and glimpses, each "written . . . from scratch."
Since none of them has anythingmuch to do with the ones that preceded
them, "wecan neverpiece the glimpsesinto a coherentpicture."Whatever
coherenceand meaning resides in the narrative,the readermust struggle
to create.
(68-69)

A number of the fragmented episodes McDowell is referring to are

of a shocking and violent nature: two young girls watch a little boy
drown, a mother kills her son, a daughter watches her mother burn,
a woman sleeps with the husband of her best friend. As readers of

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 N I S S E N * 265

the novel, a major part of our interpretive struggle is trying to de-

termine how we feel about these happenings. The work we must do
is ethical work.
Even by my choice of words in briefly describing scenes from the
story, I have implied some sort of attitude toward them. I might
have written: Sula and Nel drownChicken Little, Eva murdersPlum,
Sula doesnothingto save Hannah's life, Sula seducesJude. In her nar-
ration, Morrison too has been forced by her very use of language to
give pointers to the evaluation of charactersand events in the story.
These pointers are not in the form we might have expected in earlier
times. Morrison's narrator does not tell us the "moral"of the story
as a whole, or of any single episode. Yet this does not mean that she
abdicates the power to guide our judgment. Morrison has found
other and more indirect paths. Or rather, these indirect paths have
found her. For an ethical stance is implicit in the very discourse of
the novel, in the structure of narrative transmission the author has
chosen to relate this particular story.
Thus my purpose in this essay is twofold, to consider Sula'sspecific
response to the broad, Aristotelian question "How should one live?"
as well as the ways this response is embodied in and developed
through various aspects of the novel's narrative structure and tech-
nique. I will claim that Morrison's chosen form contains implicit an-
swers to broad ethical questions concerninghow human beings might
best live together in a community and confrontthe danger and empti-
ness in life, and that discovering these answers will involve the reader
in an interpretiveprocess that reflectsthe difficultiesand uncertainties
of making ethical judgments in our everyday lives. Ultimately, Sula
may be seen to conduct a debate as to whether individual experience
or general ethical principles are the sounder basis for personal ethics.
My combination of an ethical approach to fiction with a detailed nar-
ratological analysis will hopefully serve not only to deepen our un-
derstanding and appreciationof Morrison'snovel Sula,but to suggest
a way to read other of her narrativesand the narrativesof others.

The ethics of narrative is different from the ethics in narrative. In

other words, every narrative has an ethics, but not every narrative is
about ethics. I intend that the term "ethics of narrative"be under-

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 266 * C O N T EM P O RA RY L I T E R AT U R E

stood to mean the study of the ethical aspect of narrative form. I

choose to call this aspect "ethical"because any formal choice within
a communicative situation is value-laden. What is said comes into
focus through what is not said. How a characteror event is narrated
may be highlighted through comparison with the means that have
not been chosen. Whether or not the author is making systematic
and ethical claims in or through her story, she cannot avoid making
claims through the story's form. Who is given voice? Who is si-
lenced? Who is characterizeddirectly,who indirectly? Who is the fo-
calizer? Who is focalized? What events are elided? What events are
described scenically? Whose minds may we enter and whose not?
How are these depictions of consciousness structured? As far as
these choices guide us in determining our attitude to the novel's
charactersand events, they are ethical choices.
There are of course ethical dimensions to the narrative text that
are not of a structural nature-first and foremost, the actions of the
charactersthemselves. It is the discussion of the epistemological sta-
tus of fictional events and their evaluation as a basis for ethical ar-
guments-the ethics in narrative-that is at the center of much cur-
rent work within the "ethics of fiction." I will consider the ethics in
Sula in due course, but always keeping in mind that in a text there
are no actions in themselves; all is language. Thus any evaluation of
a narrative's ethical stance must begin with the analysis of the ethics
of narrative representation in the work.
It is difficult to imagine an approach to an ethics of narrativethat is
divorced from the study of specific literaryexamples. GerardGenette,
who has given us one important starting point for such a study with
his NarrativeDiscourse,finds it hard to imagine an ethics of narrative
at all. He writes in response to a criticismfrom Wayne Booth:

I do not believe that the techniques of narrative discourse are especially in-
strumental in producing... affective impulses. Sympathy or antipathy for
a character depends essentially on the psychological or moral (or physi-
cal!) characteristics the author gives him, the behavior and speeches he at-
tributes to him, and very little on the technique of the narrative in which
he appears.
(NarrativeDiscourseRevisited153)

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 N I S S E N * 267

Genette goes on to say, "No doubt I exaggerate, and unquestionably

I paid too little attention to these psychological effects [in Narrative
Discourse],but in returning to them today at Booth's instigation, I see
hardly anything but the workings of focalization that can effectually
contribute to them" (153).
Genette's standpoint is one I cannot share. If the choice of specific
literary techniques did not have effects, it would be tantamount to
saying that the choice of direct speech over free indirect speech or
scene over summary would be entirely neutral and devoid of mean-
ing. Narrative techniques with no effect would also have no func-
tion. In her book TransparentMinds, Dorrit Cohn argues convinc-
ingly that the choice of one style of representationover another does
have effects. She is particularly eloquent on the subject of the multi-
farious effects of free indirect style. Cohn's point is that stylistic
choices do have effects, but what these effects are cannot be divorced
from the text in which a specific literary device occurs. Thus we can-
not say whether the use of free indirect style will create an effect of
sympathy or irony independent of the "narrative situation" in
which it occurs (Cohn 138). I hope to show that the ethical choices
open to an author in writing her story do not relate only to focaliza-
tion, as Genette concedes they might, but extend to all aspects of the
narrative.As long as there is choice, there is no innocent choice.
Importantaspects of the ethics of narrativein the modernist novel
may be illustrated by the scene "late one night in 1921," in which
Morrison faces one of her biggest narrative challenges: how to rep-
resent a mother taking the life of her son. This is a scene in the sense
that it purports to be a minute-by-minute account from the time Eva
leaves her room until she returns to that room after having poured
kerosene on Plum and set him alight. The three formal determinants
of its meaning are its voice (Who speaks?), its perspective (Where is
the focus of perception?)-taken together we would traditionally
call these two elements "point of view"-and its speed (the rela-
tionship of the time of the telling to the time of the told). As relates
to narrative speed, this brief episode, taking up two and a half pages
of the narrative, is signaled as significant merely through the fact of
its scenic representation. In contrast, Eva's twenty-eight years in
various nursing homes are not narratively significant, as nothing is

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 268 - C O N TEM P O RA RY L I T E R AT U R E

told about them at all. The same period of Nel's life is summarized
in two paragraphs.
The voice in the passage is basically the narrator's, including the
extended metaphor of Eva as a heron. The choice of comparing her
to this bird rather than, say, a vulture or a crow is, of course, mean-
ingful in the context of what is to follow. We also note that later,
when the perspective is that of Plum, he perceives his mother's arm
as "the great wing of an eagle pouring a wet lightness over him"
(47). In the remainder of the passage, the voice is alternately that of
the narratorgiving a neutral report of events and that of Plum in a
drugged stupor. Eva is voiceless, with the exception of her one re-
mark, "I'm going, Plum" (47). Plum's direct speech shows us how
far gone he is; Eva's silence shows that she is beyond words.
The perspective of the scene shifts several times. Eva is at first fo-
calized by the narrator;then she becomes the focalizer. There is no
extended depiction of her consciousness; we are only told that she
"let her memory spin, loop and fall" (46) and are given one example.
Morrison makes no attempt to analyze or represent in detail Eva's
thoughts at this terrible moment. Instead she writes, "Evalifted her
tongue to the edge of her lip to stop the tears from running into her
mouth" (47). The reader must read between the lines, picture the
scene, and imagine what Eva is feeling. Her shock of discovery
when bringing the strawberry crush to her lips also becomes the
reader's shock of discovery. It propels her into action, as it poten-
tially propels us into an understanding of the gravity of the situa-
tion. Plum's focalization, which follows directly,is significant for the
way it defamiliarizes a gruesome process and may be seen as an ex-
ample of what BarbaraJohnson refers to as Morrison's aestheticiza-
tion of violence, "transforming horror into pleasure, violence into
beauty" (171). The effect for the reader is again one of delay, a delay
in realizing what is actually happening. The realization does not
come until we read that "the kerosene-soaked Plum lay in snug de-
light" (47). The order of the events within the scene is important (as
the "setup"and "payoff"with the strawberry crush showed), but so
is the position of the scene within the novel as a whole. Plum's death
comes right at the end of the fourth section, labeled "1921."There
are 125 more pages in which the implied author can continue to in-
fluence the reader's understanding of this violent event.

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 N I S S E N * 269

Previous to the scene of Plum's death, there are two lengthy sec-
tions giving access to Eva's mind. They are both psychonarrations.
Psychonarration-"the analysis of a character's thoughts taken on
directly by the narrator"(Genette, NarrativeDiscourseRevisited58)-
can be used dissonantly or consonantly. Access to the character's
mind can cause either sympathy or judgment, depending on the
narrator's tone. The white bargeman's thoughts on finding Chicken
Little are an example of dissonant psychonarration: "Later,sitting
down to smoke on an empty lard tin, still bemused by God's curse
and the terrible burden his own kind had of elevating Ham's sons,
he suddenly became alarmed by the thought that the corpse in this
heat would have a terrible odor, which might get into the fabric of
his woolen cloth" (63-64). The language of the first phrase is clearly
influenced by the bargeman's cliched biblical rhetoric, though the
voice is that of the narratorreporting the man's thoughts. A unique
way in which Morrison creates dissonance is seen in Helene's psy-
chonarration on her and Nel's trip south. In this passage, Morrison
uses metaphorical comparisons the charactercan hardly have been
expected to make herself, and this creates an estranging effect when
used when one of these characters is clearly the focalizer. Thus the
overly fastidious Helene notices the soldiers' "shit-coloreduniforms"
(21), and, even more anomalously, a group of men at a railroad sta-
tion that Helene passes by are described as standing like "wrecked
Dorics" (24). The effect of this breach in verisimilitude is to signal a
distance between narratorand character.
Consonant psychonarration is much more prevalent in Sula than
the dissonant type. According to Cohn, consonant psychonarration
is characterized by the absence of gnomic present statements, spec-
ulative or explanatory commentary, distancing appellations, and
prominent analytic or conceptual terms (31). There is a cohesion of
the narratorand the character:"The narratoris still there, he is still
reporting, with phrases denoting inner happenings.... Yet these
phrases show the discretion of the narrating voice, how it yields to
the figural thoughts and feelings even as it reports them" (31). The
psychonarration on pages 33-34 of Sula, telling us what was going
through Eva's head after her husband left her with only "$1.65,five
eggs, three beets and no idea of what or how to feel" (32), is conso-
nant. There is no distance between the narratorand Eva, and the ac-

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 270 - C O N TEM P O RA RY L I T E R AT U R E

count shades into the free indirect style of narrated monologue. The
focus is on the clarity of Eva's reasoning as she tries to find a way out
of her predicament and her resolve in doing what has to be done to
save baby Plum's life.
The scene of Boy Boy's brief visit to the Bottom in 1898is also struc-
tured to createsympathy for Eva. The scene is focalized through Eva,
who on hearing of his return "hadno idea what she would do or feel"
(35). Psychonarrationis ideally suited to describing those situations
when a characterdoes not know what to think or when his or her
thoughts cannot easily be verbalized. The scene in Eva's kitchen con-
tains descriptions such as "It was like talking to somebody's cousin
who just stopped by to say howdy before getting on back to wherever
he came from";"Ithit her like a sledge hammer";"Aliquid trailof hate
flooded her chest" (36). These comparisons, similes, and metaphors
are what Cohn calls "psycho-analogies"-images that try to capture
something subverbal, a gut feeling or a sensation that cannot be put
into words by the character,but that has to be by the narrator.These
figures are the surest sign of the intimacy between Eva and the narra-
tor, and they create a concomitant sympathy between her and the
reader.It is not necessarily true that "[t]hevery exposure... to a char-
acter's point of view-his thoughts, emotions, experience-tends to
establish an identificationwith that character,and an alignment with
his value picture" (Leech and Short 275), but this is the effect of the
psychonarrationused in the characterizationof Eva.
Through the manipulation of speed, voice, perspective, and order,
Morrison has given a lead-up to Eva's killing of her son that will not
make it easy to dismiss her and that will guarantee, if not the reader's
sympathy, at least his or her attempt at understanding. The repre-
sentation of Plum's death is mimetic of the watching and waiting
Hannah and Eva have been doing, and the readeris made to undergo
a similar process, from bemused anticipation to horrified certainty.

Sulacontains an unusual combination of omniscient and figural nar-

ration. Unusual, at least, if we have come to think of "point-of-view"
narrative as one that conducts the narration through the conscious-
ness of one or more of the characters, almost as if the story were
telling itself. But as Suzanne Ferguson has pointed out, in the works

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 N I S S E N * 271

of the writers considered central to the development of literary im-

pressionism-Flaubert and Henry James-the authorial presence is
"quite palpable," however "selective" and "sporadic" the omni-
science of their narratorsappears to be. Ferguson writes, "two major
aspects of authorial presence in third-person impressionist narrative
[are]over-intervention and indirect reporting of speech and thought
in free indirect style" (234). These descriptions also fit Sula's "omni-
scient, somewhat evasive narrator"(Grant92). Classical signs of the
narrator's omniscience in Sula are her prophetic powers ("Itwas the
last as well as the first time [Nel] was ever to leave Medallion" [29]);
her ability to foreshadow ("after 1910 [Eva] didn't willingly set foot
on the stairs but once and that was to light a fire" [37]);and her abil-
ity to pass in and out of various minds at will. The fact that she has
this omniscience does not necessarily mean that she makes use of it.
When events are focalized through a character,there is, per defini-
tion, "a restriction of 'field,' ... a selection of narrative information
with respect to what was traditionally called omniscience"(Genette,
NarrativeDiscourseRevisited74).
With regard to point of view, Sula is a perspectival relay race. The
novel contains no fewer than six majorfocalizers or "reflectors"of the
action-Shadrack, Helene, Nel, Eva, Sula, and Hannah-among
whom Nel and Sula are quantitatively and qualitatively the most im-
portant. Their friendship is at the heart of the novel, as KarenF Stein
has suggested (147),and the larger ethical claims the novel is making
are closely bound up with the representationof these two girls and
their growing up. As long as Sula and Nel are one, so to speak, no im-
portantdistinction is made in the ways in which they are represented.
Nel is introduced via her mother,and the firstepisode in which we en-
counter her in action is the episode on the train.There she takes over
the power of focalization, the perspective becomes hers, as she real-
izes her separateness from her mother. Similarly,we first encounter
Sula's thoughts and feelings in reaction to her mother Hannah. The
only differenceis one of quantity.Nel is given a psychonarrationover
several pages to depict her reaction to her mother's shame; of Sula's
reactionto overhearingher mother's statement that she loves Sula but
does not like her, we are only told that "the pronouncement sent her
flying up the stairs. In bewilderment, she stood at the window fin-
gering the curtain edge, aware of a sting in her eye" (57).

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 272 - C O N T EM P O RA RY L I T E R AT U R E

The traumatic incident of Chicken Little's drowning foreshadows

Nel's and Sula's incipient difference(s)and their parting of the ways.
The scene of the accident begins distinctly from the perspective of
"they,"to emphasize the concurrence of the two girls' sensory im-
pressions and impulses: "Theyran," "they flung themselves," "they
lay," "in concert," "Together they worked," "Each then looked,"
"Theystood up, stretched,""At the same instant" (57-59). The sepa-
ration of their perspective when Sula and Chicken Little climb the
tree-"From their height [Nel] looked small and foreshortened"
(60)-is a foreshadowing of the girls' widely differing reactionsto the
accident that is just about to take place. As the water darkens and
closes over the place where Chicken Little sank, the perspective of
the scene becomes that of Sula alone: "The pressure of his hard and
tight little fingers was still in Sula's palms" (61). Next Sula encoun-
ters Shadrackin his cabin in a psychonarrationthat really says very
little about what she is feeling, only that it is terrorand fear.Like Eva
before killing Plum, Sula is speechless at this time of emotional crisis.
Not so Nel. Nel is self-controlled,she is able to speak soothing words,
she is able to concern herself with something as trivial as what has
happened to Sula's belt, which Sula has not even noticed is missing.
Linden Peach has noted how Sula's and Nel's differing responses
at Chicken Little's funeral further emphasize the disjunction I have
outlined above (49). The point of no return for these two friends is,
of course, when Nel finds Sula and Jude "down on all fours naked"
(105) on the floor of her bedroom. Nel's emotional response to dis-
covering Jude and Sula together, Jude's departure, and the loss of
Sula's friendship is divided into four parts. Taken together the four
fragments are a vivid illustration of the valences of the various dis-
cursive modes for presenting consciousness. The first section is nar-
rated monologue in free indirect style with direct speech embedded
in it. The second section begins as narrated monologue but quickly
turns into quoted monologue. The third section is an intermixtureof
psychonarration with snatches of narrated and quoted monologue.
The final section is again quoted monologue, or what we commonly
call "streamof consciousness."
The second and the fourth fragments-Nel's plaintive apostro-
phes to Jude and to Jesus-are the only examples in the novel of au-
tonomous quoted monologue (traditionally called interior mono-

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 N IS S EN 273

logue). This in itself marks the passages as significant. In stylistics,

the quoted monologue is regarded as the linguistic equivalent of di-
rect speech, and like the direct quotation of a character's spoken
words, it is ostensibly the most unmediated form for representing
consciousness, "a literal citation of ... thoughts as they are verbal-
ized in inner speech" (Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited 56).
Thus it has been felt that in such passages one comes closest to the
very soul of the character.The connotations of the form are sincerity,
intimacy, and reliability.The hitch with this traditional response, as
Cohn has pointed out, is that it is far from certain that all thoughts
are verbalized in "inner speech." It cannot be certain that a quoted
monologue provides the most immediate and reliable access to the
character's innermost feelings-rather the opposite, in fact. Cohn
shows how Robert Musil, Proust, and Nathalie Sarraute, who all
"perceive a deep cleavage between mental language and other men-
tal realities," "use quoted monologue to expose the mendacity of a
character's thinking language, rather than to depict searchingly in-
trospective minds" (80). In her reticent use of quoted monologue,
Morrison would appear to share Proust's view that interior dis-
course hides more than it reveals.
In my view, Nel's quoted monologues are a prime example of the
deceptiveness of this apparently objective and reliable narrative
technique. The fact that Nel is able to tell herself a story about her
shocking experience may be seen as a signal that she is not delving
deeply enough in her self-examination. Her thoughts are well-
ordered, even rhetorical,with none of the "syntacticalabbreviation"
or "lexical opaqueness" Cohn describes as the standard stylistic de-
vices of the Joycean interior monologue (94). As the ending of the
novel confirms, this is a case of major repression, one that lasts for
twenty-eight years. Retrospectively we see that these passages con-
tain rationalizations rather than realizations.
So why are many readers taken in? Why do we not trust our own
feelings? What is there in the depiction of Jude and Nel's relation-
ship to make us think his departure would make her feel a violent
sense of loss? Strictly speaking, nothing. The reader is even told that
her love for him "had spun a steady gray web around her heart"
(95). Yet we have taken her response at face value. We do so largely,
I think, because of the alleged directness of its representation.

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 274 ' C O N T EM P O RA RY L I T E R AT U R E

S. Diane Bogus writes, "Bymaking this switch in point of view, Mor-

rison steps out of the way so we can begin to be sympathetic ... to
Nel"; and Bogus, in her own words, does "become sympathetic to
her" (75). Elliott Butler-Evans observes similarly that sympathy is
gained for Nel through a "shift in narrative focus" (87), where the
events are viewed from Nel's point of view. The first monologue, a
rumination on Jude's left-behind tie, reinforces the impression. That
the monologue that comes closest to Joycean stream of conscious-
ness is placed last makes it the final word on the matter until the
very end of the novel. To a certain extent, it wipes out the impression
of the long preceding section. On closer inspection, though, this
third section may be seen to indicate a subverbal and subconscious
level of Nel's mind, which she is not willing to explore and which
only becomes plain when the epiphanic ending throws a new light
over all that precedes it.
The third passage is psychonarration, the mode which allows the
writer to approach the subconscious, if only metaphorically. The
most important clue to depths unsounded and feelings unexamined
is, of course, the ball of muddy strings. C. Lynn Munro has sug-
gested that the gray ball "functions as an objective correlative for the
gestalt of emotions which Nel has chosen to dismiss categorically
rather than attempt to untangle" (152). In Cohn's terms, the ball of
fluff is another example of a psycho-analogy, an attempt at captur-
ing an ineffable feeling of dread and loss and a symbol of the ques-
tions Nel cannot or will not deal with. The hair ball functions so
powerfully here because it is not only a metaphor for the state of
Nel's mind but is also a metonymy, a symptom of a mental distur-
bance, an actual part of her consciousness.
Despite this eloquent sign that Nel is not able to come to terms
with the true cause of her grief, readers have been convinced that
her depression is due to the loss of Jude. The extent to which the
reader may forget any signals that point in a different direction is
vividly illustrated by Butler-Evans's statement: "While the conclu-
sion of the novel indicates a moment in which Nel suddenly realizes
that it was her separation from Sula that caused her pain, there is no
sense in which that insight even remotely enters her mind earlier"
(85). What of the following passage from the third section? "Here
she was in the midst of it, hating it, scared of it, and again she

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 N I S S E N * 275

thought of Sula as though they were still friends and talked things
over. That was too much. To lose Jude and not have Sula to talk to
about it because it was Sula that he had left her for" (110).
Despite the long psychonarration, in which Jude is barely men-
tioned, it is all too easy to persist in the belief that Nel's sense of loss
is occasioned by her husband's departure.In doing so, though, one is
being as conventional as Nel herself. Nel's reactionis what one would
expect, and thus one does not question it. In a novel where one sel-
dom gets what one expects, the reader should be more suspicious.
There is no better example in the novel of how Morrison uses for-
mal devices to guide our ethical appraisal of the characters,even if,
in this case, the result may be a faulty judgment. There is no neces-
sary connection between Nel deceiving herself and her deceiving us,
but if Morrison is to achieve her powerful final effect she is depen-
dent on having the reader undergo a process of perception that is
not unlike that of her characterNel. Only the most conscious of writ-
ers manage to achieve this mimetic fit between fictional form and
what we may old-fashionedly call the moral of the story.

Taken as a whole, Sula's form mirrors the complexities of ethical

judgment and displays the difficulty and uncertainty of ethical
choices. McDowell raises the pertinent question: "Can we ever de-
termine the right judgment?" According to her, Sula "implies that
that answer can only come from within, from exploring all parts of
the self" (68). This would appear to me to be a mistaken interpreta-
tion. One lesson the novel teaches very clearly is that the self is not
enough, no matter how many parts of it one is drawing on. Had the
self been enough, Sula with her egocentric individualism would
have been much closer to the ethical center of the work. She has cer-
tainly explored more parts of the self than her contemporaries in the
Bottom, yet despite her bravado, she never attains the ethical stand-
ing of, say, her grandmother.
McDowell has written one of the most insightful essays on Sulato
date, but to my mind she is too positive in her appraisal of the title
character.Though she is careful to note that the novel "does not re-
duce a complex set of dynamics to a simple opposition or choice be-
tween two 'pure' alternatives" (68), her own reading threatens to do

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 276 * C O N T EM P O RA RY L I T E R AT U R E

just that by the extent to which it favors Sula's perspective over and
against that of Nel. While it is true that the reader "must undergo the
process of development that Nel undergoes," this development
does not involve "embracing what Sula represents: the self as
process and fluid possibility" (66), but rather means taking full re-
sponsibility for one's life and actions, and gaining a deeper under-
standing of one's situation and lived experience.
One way to answer McDowell's question concerning "rightjudg-
ment" and to gain some sort of objective hold on the relative ethical
position and worth of the various charactersin Sula is to be found in
Lynne Tirrell'sessay "Storytelling and Moral Agency." There Tirrell
seeks to "explore the notion that telling stories to ourselves is neces-
sary for being moral agents" (116), and she uses Morrison's first
novel, The Bluest Eye, as her example. According to Tirrell, moral
agency is characterized by at least three features: (1) the capacity to
represent (particularly one's own actions and those of others); (2) a
sense of self (which involves an ability to distinguish oneself from
others); and (3) being capable of making judgments marked by "au-
thority" (that is, making ethical decisions, acting on them, and being
able to justify them to others).
Against this background,we see even more clearly why Sula is not
fully a moral agent and cannot be a model for emulation. She does not
have Eva's power to representher own ethical position and to justify
her actions to others. While Sula's sense of self is strong, maybe too
strong, it borders on solipsism because she has little sense of how she
appears to the world around her. Munro has observed that Sula
"never really comes to terms with the limitations of her approach to
life" (153).What is essential to an ethical position, and that which Sula
lacks, is an understanding of and empathy with the other.RobertSar-
gent comments: "[A] major theme of [Morrison's]novels is the need
for balance or wholeness. These qualities may be acquired by the
charactersin the novels only through an act that is analogous to one
involved in the creationof art-an act of the imagination which comes
from a willingness to see the world as others see it" (229). As Tirrell
concludes, "Withoutat least a minimally articulated notion of one's
place in the community, one cannot be a moral agent" (124).
In her emphasis on the importance of perception-"the ability to
discern, acutely and responsively, the salient features of one's par-

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 N I S S E N * 277

ticular situation" (Nussbaum 37)-Morrison comes very close to an

Aristotelian situationalist ethics, as illustrated by the later novels of
Henry James and explicated by Nussbaum in her essay on The
GoldenBowl. "The Aristotelian view," writes Nussbaum, "stresses
that bonds of close friendship or love (such as those that connect
members of a family, or close personal friends) are extremely im-
portant in the whole business of becoming a good perceiver" (44).
She writes that, to James, "Moralknowledge ... is not simply intel-
lectual grasp of propositions; it is not even simply intellectual grasp
of particularfacts;it is perception. It is seeing a complex, concrete re-
ality in a highly lucid and richly responsive way; it is taking in what
is there, with imagination and feeling" (152).
If it is true, as McDowell asserts, that Morrison "denies the whole
notion of characteras static essence,replacing it with the idea of char-
acter as process"(61), it is equally true that she represents the ethical
perception of an event as process. Johnson has pointed out that "[t]he
dissociation of affect and event is one of Morrison's most striking lit-
erary techniques in [Sula],both in her narrative voice ... and in the
emotional lives of her characters"(168). As Nel's response to Jude's
and Sula's infidelity shows, the "truth"about any situation may only
become apparent after many years have passed. This in turn makes
the evaluation of right and wrong an ongoing and potentially indef-
inite activity.The principle of deferred significance is essential to the
novel's epistemology, and it indicates that if there ever is a final, cor-
rect judgment, it may be a long time in the making.
There would appear to be in Sula an implicit claim that the only
way one may attain perception-however imperfect-is through
conversation. The only way "to see the world as others see it" is
through dialogue. Though the representation of dialogue is not
dominant in the novel, the fictional conversations are often impor-
tant sites both for the contestation of prior ethical claims and the (at
least partial) resolution of ethical dilemmas. Some of the sections of
dialogue come closer than anything to resolving the major ethical
conflicts in the novel.
Two important examples are Hannah's confrontation with her
mother and Nel's confrontationwith Sula. In these conversations, ex-
planations are sought, implications are dredged up, and motivations
are given by the charactersthemselves, making them, in addition to

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 278 ? C O N T EM P O RA RY L I T E R AT U R E

the novel's representationsof consciousness, the most important loci

for ethical interpretation.The form of these scenes is again signifi-
cant. Dialogue can be presented in four basic ways, through report
(He announced his departure);direct speech ("I'm going," he said);
indirect speech (He said he was going); and free indirect speech (He
was going). As the scene in the kitchen between Sula, Nel, and Jude
makes clear,the choice of one of these forms and the combination of
them is significant.While Nel's and Sula's speech acts are given in di-
rect speech, Jude's words are only reported, with highly ironic effect.
The summary of Jude's "whiney tale that peaked somewhere be-
tween anger and a lapping desire for comfort" (103) is in contrast to
the almost page-long quotation of Sula's response to his complaint
that "a Negro man had a hard row to hoe in this world" (103). This
differentialtreatmentwould seem to imply that Jude is not worth lis-
tening to, while Sula deserves our undivided attention.
In the conversations I wish to focus on, the dialogue of the char-
acters is always given in direct speech, which is the closest fiction
can come in approximating an external reality. As Genette has
pointed out, "the only thing that language can imitate perfectly is
language" ("Frontiers"132). The fact that Morrison quotes the char-
acters' words verbatim lends an air of objectivity to the scene ("this
is what was actually said") but also leaves it entirely up to the reader
to discern the implications of the dialogue.
Hannah and Nel set off their respective confrontations with Eva
and Sula by asking some of the same probing questions we have been
asking. Why did Eva kill Plum? How could Sula sleep with Jude?De-
spite being conventionally in the wrong, on the defensive, Eva and
Sula come away as the victors in these confrontations.One can put
this down to their superior intelligence or their advanced verbal
rhetoric,but it is the narratorwho in the final instancelets them speak.
Eva and Sula are given all the good lines. The narratorgives Eva the
only metanarrativein the novel-the lengthy and powerful mono-
logue in which she explains her fear that Plum would one day force
himself upon her-and Sula the prophetic rhapsody beginning, "Oh,
they'll love me all right. It will take time, but they'll love me" (145).
Maybe to counter the enormous rhetorical power of these women,
Morrisongives the perspective in these scenes to Hannah and Nel. In
the phrases that sometimes intersperse the dialogue, brief reactions

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 N I S S E N * 279

from the daughter and friend are recordedthat show that the scene is
being focalized through them. Ratherthan adjustthe balance,though,
this privilege only works to reveal the total absence of an adequate re-
sponse in Hannah to what Eva is telling her and the inability of Nel to
comprehend what Sula is saying. While Eva struggles to explain how
difficult it was even to keep herself and her children alive in response
to Hannah's question "Mamma, did you ever love us?" Hannah is
only preoccupied with planning supper. When on her deathbed Sula
tries to engage her friend in a deeply ethical conversationon the ques-
tion of how to live a good life, Nel's mental response is that Sula
is "showing off" and that "Talkingto her about right and wrong was
like talking to the deweys" (143, 145). Out of self-absorption and
narrow-mindedness, Hannah and Nel are not interested in pursuing
the ethical discussion they themselves have instigated. Hannah does
not feel any interest or sympathy in response to her mother's tale;
there is never any doubt in Nel's mind that she is in the right. An in-
teresting contrast to these scenes is the confrontation between Sula
and her grandmother,which covers some of the same ground as that
between Hannah and Eva. Again, the characters'words are quoted
directly,but this time the scene is not focalized at all, neither charac-
ter's thoughts being made available to us. This makes it much more
difficult to decide who comes out the victor.
These conversations are on the whole unsuccessful. They do not
bring the participants closer to each other in a mutual understand-
ing. Yet there can be no doubt that the author still holds out a hope
for the life-enhancing powers of dialogue. One of the few uncondi-
tionally beautiful relationships in the novel-that between Ajax and
Sula-is depicted as working so well (at least to Sula's mind) be-
cause they have "genuine conversations" (127). Significantly,Morri-
son chooses not to reproduce one of these conversations but only re-
ports what they are like from Sula's perspective: "He did not speak
down to her or at her, nor content himself with puerile questions
about her life or monologues of his own activities" (127-28). The em-
phasis is on equality, empathy, and meeting each other half way.
This is the type of conversation the dying Sula tries to have with her
friend Nel, but it is too late. Sula can no longer make her friend "see
old things with new eyes" (95).
In the implicit debate in the novel between those favoring a per-

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 280 * C O N T EM P O RA RY L I T E R AT U R E

sonal ethics based on perception through dialogue and those hold-

ing firm to principle and universal ethical laws, the Peace women-
Eva and Sula and to a certain extent Hannah-would seem to stand
on the side of ethical improvisation and the Wright women-Helene
and Nel-on the side of convention. To some extent, the conflict is
whether the mind or the emotions should have preeminence in our
ethical deliberations. The shortcomings of going to either extreme
are nowhere better summed up than in Nel's and Sula's thoughts
about each other:

The situationwas clearto [Nel] now. Sula... was incapableof makingany

but the most trivial decisions. When it came to mattersof grave impor-
tance, she behaved emotionallyand irresponsiblyand left it to others to
straightenout. And when fear struck her, she did unbelievable things.
Like that time with her finger.Whateverthose hunkies did, it wouldn't
have been as bad as what she did to herself.ButSulawas so scaredshe had
mutilatedherself,to protectherself.
(101)

Nel, [Sula]remembered,always thrivedon a crisis.The closed place in the

water;Hannah'sfuneral.Nel was the best.WhenSulaimitatedher,or tried
to, those long yearsago, it always ended up in some actionnoteworthynot
forits coolnessbut mostlyforits beingbizarre.Theone timeshe triedto pro-
tect Nel, she had cut off her own fingertip and earnednot Nel's gratitude
but herdisgust.Fromthen on she had let heremotionsdictateherbehavior.

(141)

For Nel there are no ethical dilemmas because there are always rules
to follow. If you only watch a crime, you are not guilty of commit-
ting it. If your best friend makes love to your husband and he leaves
you, then your friend becomes your enemy and you grieve for the
loss of your husband. When an old friend is sick, you visit her, even
if you hate her. In a crisis you remain calm and try to minimize the
damage.
As the novel shows, "coolness" is different from goodness. One
can do the right things for the wrong reasons. And reason can blind
one to the truth of the emotions. Conventional morality blocks Nel's
realization of her own complicity in Chicken Little's death and her
loss of Sula's friendship. Nel enters so fully into the role of the inno-

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 N I S S E N * 281

cent bystander and the abandoned wife, succumbs so totally to the

ostensible primacy of the marriage bond and the heterosexual rela-
tionship, that for a quarter of a century she is blind to the truth about
her own life.
Morrison's last chance to display the potentially regenerative
powers of dialogue is the scene between Eva and Nel in the nursing
home. At this point Eva is ninety-five years old and we have not en-
countered her for more than seventy pages. While the conversation
between Eva and her daughter Hannah brought perception only to
the former,and that between Eva and Sula ended in a stalemate, the
conversation between Eva and Nel in the nursing home illustrates
the potential for shared understanding that lies in dialogue. There is
again a parallel with James's ethical vision as interpreted by Nuss-
baum. "Progress,"Nussbaum writes, "comes not from the teaching
of an abstractlaw but by leading the friend, or child, or loved one-
by a word, by a story, by an image-to see some new aspect of the
concrete case at hand, to see it as this or that. Giving a 'tip' is to give
a gentle hint about how one might see" (160). What is it Eva does in
this scene but exactly that, give Nel a tip?

"Tellme how you killed that little boy."

"What?Whatlittle boy?"
"Theone you threw in the water.I got oranges.How did you get him in
the water?"
"Ididn't throw no little boy in the river.Thatwas Sula."
"You.Sula. What'sthe difference?Youwas there.Youwatched, didn't
you? Me, I never would've watched."
(168)

This is much the same tip that her friend Sula gave her when she
asked, "How you know? ... About who was good. How you know
it was you?" (146). Only after twenty-five years and a new reminder
can Nel begin to answer this question, both with regard to Chicken
Little's death and the way she parted from her husband.
Given the fundamentally polyphonic nature of Morrison's novel
and human fallibility, no single character may squarely inhabit or
embody the ethical center of the text, that is, coincide entirely with
the ethical stance of the implied author.Yet Roseann P.Bell and Deb-

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 282 * C O N TEM P O RA RY L I T E R AT U R E

orah Guth rightly emphasize the significance of the character Eva

Peace. Eva has subtle powers over both her world and the narrative
representation of that world that are not paralleled by any other
character.I have already noted many examples of the cohesion be-
tween the narratorand this character.In addition to consonant psy-
chonarrationand metanarrative,Eva's ethos is enhanced by the way
in which her "mind style" affects the narrator'sstyle and the way in
which the use of repetitive discourse shows Eva's impressions of the
other characters to be correct and her memory to be reliable. The
chapter entitled "1923,"which deals with Hannah's death by fire,
begins, "The second strange thing was Hannah's coming" (67).
Later,we find: "Butbefore the second strange thing, there had been
the wind, which was the first" (73). There is no indication that these
thoughts are attributed to anyone but the narrator.Finally, seven
pages into the chapter,we read in reference to Hannah's dream of a
wedding in a red dress, "Later[Eva] would remember it as the third
strange thing" (74). Only then does it become apparent that the or-
dering of the "strange things" during two days in August is Eva's;
her perspective has influenced the narration of the entire chapter,
even those parts that are not focalized through her. Similarly,Eva's
tendency to erase the individuality of the three boys she takes into
her home, by calling them collectively "the deweys," is taken up by
the narratorand also becomes her way of referring to them. When
Eva recalls the freezing cold night she spent with Plum in the out-
house, the details of the scene are exactly the same as in the narra-
tor's rendition twenty-six pages before. In addition to this proof of
reliability,Eva's ethical standing in the narrative is increased by her
being the only one to understand some of Sula's most disturbing be-
havior. For example, Eva is convinced that "Sulahad watched Han-
nah burn not because she was paralyzed, but because she was inter-
ested" (78). She accuses Sula of this during their argument, and in
Sula's dying monologue her suspicion is confirmed.
In Munro'swords, Sulaprovides the following answer to the peren-
nial philosophical and ethical question, How should one live?:

[Morrison] ... suggests that only by forging meaningful relationships can

the individual transcend the agony of alienated existence and attain a
wholeness.... [I]f one is willing to take the risks of honest involvement,

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 N I S S E N * 283

one can effecta middle groundbetweenthe self-denyingretreatchosenby

Nel... and the self-righteousdisregardfor otherschosen by Sula.
(154)

Eva is the character who goes furthest in this "honest involvement,"

in what James in his preface to The Princess Casamassima calls being
"finely aware and richly responsible" (qtd. in Nussbaum 135). Re-
gardless of how we may ultimately judge her killing of her son-as
euthanasia or murder-Eva goes further in her thinking about the
other and her understanding of the other, in her human empathy,
than Sula or Nel or Hannah or Helene. Terry Otten says of her, "Eva,
who could commit the 'crime' of burning to death her only son in a
profound act of love and yet risk her own life trying to save her
daughter from fire, experiences good and evil in human rather than
moralistic terms" (43). This is another way of saying that in a conflict
between universal ethical laws and the exigencies of the concrete,
lived situation in all its uniqueness, Eva will not be pacified by fear
or convention. The statement "Me, I never would've watched"
seems to sum up her personal ethics. As the novel shows, she prac-
tices what she preaches.
Toni Morrison contributes to our understanding of the importance
of perception in ethics her idea of perception as process, her stress on
learning from others through conversation, and the extension of the
ethical inquiry into "parts unknown" of the American social and
racial landscape. One reviewer's reaction to Sula and novels by Ed
Bullins and Alice Walker was: "It is not that their viewpoint is
amoral-we are asked for judgment. It's that the characters we judge
lie so far outside the guidelines by which we have always made our
judgments" (Bryant 10). Yet as Wayne Booth has pointed out, "It is
not the degree of otherness that distinguishes fiction of the highest
ethical kind but the depth of education it yields in dealing with the
'other"' (195). Ultimately, Sula's form contributes as much to ethics as
does its abstractable content.

University of Oslo

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 284 * C O N TEM P O RA RY L I T E R AT U R E

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