Considering Claude Pruitt’s “Circling Meaning in Toni Morrison’s Sula”

Claude Pruitt’s “Circling Meaning in Toni Morrison’s Sula” argues that the author organizes her novel as a concentric series of physical, temporal, and narrative circles, which radiate out from the book’s emotional core like the ripples that float out from Chicken Little’s disappeared body. These circles mirror (or are palimpsests that contain traces of) first a psychoanalytic concept advanced by Jacque Lacan in which he envisions the unconscious as three interlocking circles comprised of the “symbolic,” the “imaginary,” and the “real;’” next, the philosophical essay “Circles” by Ralph Waldo Emerson, which imagines time as rippling circles representing a universe in flux, with individuals buffeted at their center; and finally, Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, which engages directly with Emerson’s “Circles,” thrusting his narrator into the downward spiral of the midcentury black American experience. Sula is intertextual with these, but in placing black American women at the novel’s heart, she repositions the focus to a group that has been routinely scrubbed from both linear accounts of history and from earlier African American literature that, while likewise circular, have been written primarily by and about men.

The friendship between Nel and Sula is the beating heart of the novel, spatially, temporally, and conceptually. But the account of their friendship is embedded within and inextricable from other narrative circles. Physically, the story takes place in the “Bottom,” a high ground that surrounds the fecund farmland below (at least until white people covet the Bottom’s views). The friendship takes place in the central 100 pages of the book, “1922” through “1940,” and it occurs within the circular narratives of the town’s other inhabitants (Pruitt 117). Shadrack circumnavigates the text, the town, and the seasons as a kind of modern-day prophet or shaman, a symbol of both chaos and order, as exemplified by his disorganized mind and hyper-organized home. The men in town are trapped within the circles of their despair, all “grotesque embodiments of masculinity… distracted by the only group for whom they are not completely emasculated… the women of the Bottom” (Pruitt 118). The center of the girls’ story is their sexual awakening while digging and filling holes by the river, followed immediately by what becomes an unspeakable secret: Their complicity in the death of Chicken Little. The awakening and the death, tangled together, cause a rift in narrative and psyche, seeming to split the girls’ souls. Nel’s adult identity is characterized by lack: She affects a “motherly martyrdom,” and her misery is “righteous but empty” (Pruitt 115-6). Sula, meanwhile, creates a life of sensual overabundance, and she is described on more than one occasion alongside an attendant image of “overripe green things” (Morrison 108, 174). The final image of the book—Nel finally mourning Sula—reinforces the theme of circularity: Her cry “had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow” (Morrison 174). To Pruitt, this ending is the beginning of Nel’s self-actualization, suggesting that she is ready to face her own unspeakable center, to heal her split soul (121).

Pruitt contends that the circles surrounding an “unspeakable center” in the novel are explorations of Lacan’s tripartite unconscious. He explains Lacan’s “theory of mind,” where

the symbolic is the area in which language functions, the imaginary is the realm of images, and the real is that which cannot be symbolized or imagined at a particular time, the impossible or unspeakable… Healing can occur when trauma is spoken about, even indirectly: Trauma is made more clearly “symbol” and less “real” as its symptoms are explored in language (120).

The memory of Chicken Little’s death, then, is the novel’s “real,” the unutterable trauma that unites them. Nel’s healing begins only when she can acknowledge it, albeit obliquely. Part of the tragedy is that Sula tries to discuss it on her deathbed, but Nel forestalls the catharsis until many years after Nel’s death. Before their acknowledgement of the “real,” the secret takes the form, in Lacan’s words, of symptom, “for Sula as promiscuity, for Nel as first subservient wifehood and then repressed sexuality” (Pruitt 120-1). In keeping with the novel’s other circles, the end of the book is the beginning of Nel’s life.

Concentric to this Lacanian referent are the multiple evocations of Emerson’s “Circles” and Ellison’s grappling with and dramatization of Emersonian philosophy. Ellison places his unnamed narrator into the path of the “boomerang of history,” each interaction with which “moves him lower in his descent (‘and under every deep, another deep opens,’ Emerson writes in ‘Circles.’)” (Pruitt 125). Both men, however, write a world without women, and especially black women, who are already omitted from so much history and literature. Ellison is reconciled to Emerson, Pruitt contends,

through a dialectical engagement that begins with displacement, leads to confinement in a womb of historical significance for black men, minimizes the role and historical importance of black women, and replaces their generative function with a faith in modernity and technology” (125).

Emerson urges us to abandon the past for progress: “History,” he says, “the past from which we as individuals and cultures move, [are] worthless… rags and relics” (qt. in Pruitt 126) and Pruitt remarks that Emerson “takes as axiomatic the idea of self-determination” (Pruitt 126). Morrison gives Emerson and Ellison respect through references and symbols but pushes back against progress and individualism. The “joke” of the Bottom—a white man’s joke about it being the “bottom of heaven”—evokes the grandfather’s joke in Ellison; her “plague of robins” is a reference to Ellison’s folk tune, “O well they picked poor Robin clean” (qt. in Pruitt 124); her “circles and circles of sorrow” evoke Emerson’s insistence that “under every deep, another deep opens.” But her entire endeavor highlights women, community, and the unearthing of the past’s “rags and relics,” not the burying of them. Morrison wants to resurrect and mourn a vanished community. After all, “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” (3). The land itself is a palimpsest of untold stories: She wants to speak the unutterable.

I appreciate Pruitt’s read of Morrison’s warm, difficult, perplexing novel. If I find his views difficult to summarize, it is because he structures his essay in a circular mimesis of Morrison’s project, which reads like an act of grace and admiration. While I value his read of Sula, he did skip over an alternative read that I wish he had synthesized within his own frame instead. He mentions and then discards the argument of Vashti Crutcher Lewis, who sees trickster characters from African mythology in Sula and Shadrack. In this folkloric interpretation, Sula is a water spirit, and Nel’s eventual acceptance of their bond is a reconnection with the gods of her ancestors. Pruitt dismisses Lewis because Morrison is embedded “firmly in the European psychoanalytic tradition” (119), but is there a reason it cannot be both? Most of Pruitt’s observations see the text, like the former neighborhood, as a palimpsest, and he credits Morrison for layering semiotic systems so that they resonate together. Along with folklore, it might be beneficial to note that a circular narrative can be considered counter-hegemonic: It offers an alternative to the linear structures preferred by the West.

Works Cited

Morrison, Toni. Sula. Vintage International, 2004.

Pruitt, Claude. “Circling Meaning in Toni Morrison’s Sula.” African American Review. Vol. 44, No. ½, Spring/Summer 2011, pp. 115-129.