The God of the Gaps

Ellipsis as the Unnamable in Thi Bui and Carmen Maria Machado

In “Memory and Narrative of Traumatic Events,” María Crespo and Violeta Fernández-Lansac explain the way trauma creates two discrete systems of memory that operate independently of and in parallel to one another. The first “comprises voluntary memories that are integrated with other autobiographical memories,” while the second contains “nonverbal information without a temporal context, whose access is automatic” (149). One system employs language and the other—received, involuntary, immediate—is silent. So how do memoir authors express aspects of trauma that are beyond speech? Thi Bui and Carmen Maria Machado, two unconventional memoirists who chronicle deeply scarring and politically-charged traumas, intentionally combine semiotic systems to give voice to memory’s silences. By weaving gaps and non-verbal expressions into their prose, they experientially represent the silence of second-tier traumatic memory. Bui combines textual and visual rhetoric in her graphic memoir The Best We Could Do, with spreads that let the gaps between the two semiotic systems express the hopes, fears, and uncertainties of immediate and involuntarily-experienced pain. Similarly, Machado’s In the Dream House layers its rhetorical structures: While the cracks in her text are marginally visual—in the form of experimentation with typography and form—her rhetorical breaks are primarily expressed in vertiginous genre shifts that recreate the instability of an abusive relationship. Both authors use narrative fracture, redoubling, and omission in the service of communicating the unnamable, and through these ellipses, they experientially render the unnamable disquiet of trauma.

Bui’s graphic memoir chronicles her family’s traumatic journey from war-torn Viêt Nam to the United States, and the consequent hauntings of postmemory that affect two generations of Vietnamese immigrants. She blends words with panels of black and white line drawings, unified by a single-color wash in brick-red that places readers within the inexact, sepia-tones of memory. The words can be understood as Crespo and Fernández-Lansac’s first-order processed memories, while the images become the fragmentary memories of the second order. The red wash flows freely between words, images, and panels in a way that unifies disparate aspects of the same psyche. For example, in one spread Bui draws herself at a writing desk, beginning the project, enclosed in a panel. Behind her are ocean waves in the red-wash of memory, flowing into the page below. Beneath the panel is a young girl, her back turned to us, her hair blowing in the wind. She disappears off the bottom of the page in a full bleed, without a bounding box. On her back, a black tattoo of Viêt Nam, echoed by a mirror image of Viêt Nam in the wash in front of her. The words, in boxes, say “if I could see Viêt Nam as a real place, and not a symbol of something lost… I would see my parents as real people… and learn to love them better” (Bui 36). Through apposition, ellipses, and visual metaphor, the book places readers in the swell of traumatic memory: In the literal swell of memory, as the swells of the sea that transported her family on a tiny boat out of war-torn Viêt Nam are a recurring motif that expresses vulnerability, migration, and the tidal forces of women’s bodies.

In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud provides valuable insights about the multiple semiotic overlays that activate graphic literature. The gaps between panels, for instance, are known in comics scholarship as “the gutter”—the space where the action and events of the story are implied or suggested, but not fully shown or explained, and where readers are forced to commit “closure” (McCloud 63). Closure refers to the brain’s tendency to craft conceptual links between elements in apposition, even in instances where such links are not explicated by authors. As such, closure is necessarily experiential, asking the reader to, in a sense, co-author the story. It is the space where readers’ imaginations are activated, and where the significance and implications of the story are constructed. In the spread mentioned above, readers apprehend the images instantaneously: We see a writing woman bounded in a panel, which is linked, through closure and the red background unifying them, to a young girl with her home country written, in the form of a map, on her body. These images—which aren’t connected through reason but through emotion—slowly combine with words that explicitly link the pain of the country with the ongoing pain of the family until emotion, for the reader, squares with logic. The gutter plays a crucial role in mediating between sign systems in Bui’s text. McCloud discusses the way images are instantaneously “received” while words are “perceived,” a process that takes time, specialized knowledge, and the ability to de- and recode signs (49). The lag between reception and perception causes emotion and logic to harmonize at different registers. As such, the combination of word and image is perfect for rendering both first- and second-tier traumatic memories—the verbal and the scotomized or unnamable. By leaving space for the reader's imagination to fill in the gaps, Bui harnesses closure, the gutter, and the lag between reception and perception to weave a rich and complex narrative that is both conceptually coherent and emotionally wrenching.

Machado’s In the Dream House, too, forces readers to commit closure, though her methods are more conceptual than visual, including dizzying shifts in genre that occur each chapter. Her memoir chronicles same-sex intimate partner abuse, which readers co-experience in the narrative’s constant destabilizations, diversions, and repetitions. Machado writes sudden queasy shifts, violent mood swings, and pregnant ellipses into the text, subversions of narrative expectations that mirror the gaslighting, unpredictability, and cruelty of the relationship in question. While she does not exploit the split between received images and perceived text, she does manipulate our expectations of genre: Our anticipation of generic tropes, after all, precede cognition of the complex plot. Machado names her past abusive relationship “The Dream House,” and the unnamed girlfriend as “the Woman in the Dream House.” The narrative literally takes place in a small home in Bloomington Indiana in which the two lived during the author’s early twenties; but it figuratively takes place in an increasingly isolated and atemporal dreamscape that rollercoasters from erotic heights to horror-movie lows. We can read these different narrative layers as parallel to Bui’s overlay of words and images; and both authors use these unconventional techniques to layer Crespo and Fernández-Lansac’s first- and second-order memories. Machado employs second-person narration throughout. Readers come to understand that the author is the “I” at the time of writing, apostrophizing her former self, the one trapped in time, repeatedly and eternally undergoing abuse. Each chapter resituates the Dream House in a new genre, almost like switching the channels on a television, and the chapter titles, like “Dream House as Bildungsroman”; “Dream House as Haunted Mansion”; “Dream House as Cosmic Horror,” remain the only formal constant. Many of the chapters are short and impressionistic, sometimes as short as a single sentence, with connections to the narrative that are often oblique, tenuous, associative. Thus, much of the text is blank space. The interstices between Machado’s vignettes thereby function as “gutters” of sorts, that force readers to supply the connective tissue, like they must between the panels of Bui’s graphic memoir.

In “Exploring Same-Sex Female Intimate Partner Abuse Through Literary Tropes,” Sinéad Spelman notes that Machado endeavors to “bring to light invisible, and often taboo, areas of experience through stylistic experimentation,” in which the “the autobiographical first-person interrupt[s] dynamics of erasure and silencing” (45). Like Bui, Machado paradoxically uses silence to restore her own authority over a narrative that has been hijacked. Machado must walk a fine line to tell a story that has been commandeered both by the Woman in the Dream House on the one hand and by forces that are hostile to or essentializing of LGBTQ+ experiences on the other. The textual pauses between vignettes do a lot of work, forcing readers to participate in the text by committing closure where she leaves blank spaces. Take, for instance, the gap between “Dream House as Idiom” and “Dream House as Warning”: The final lines of the former contend that “Instead of a shared structure providing shelter, [‘safe as houses’] means that the person in charge is secure; everyone else should be afraid,” which yields immediately to “A few months before your girlfriend became the Woman in the Dream House, a young… undergrad went missing in Bloomington” (Machado 78-9). While the observation about the idiom “safe as houses” and the young missing girl are literally unrelated, they are figuratively tied together, and readers cannot help but link them through closure. Thus, as happens in the ellipses between all of the vignettes—indeed one could almost take any two contiguous vignettes to make the same point—the two ideas grow together, such that even the joy of moving in with a lover becomes tinged with threat. The author is not “safe as houses” in the Dream House, since she is implicitly not the one in charge, and then she becomes the missing girl, who, it is implied, has been disappeared by a perpetrator. This perpetrator, our brains tell us, illogically, is the Woman in the Dream House.

Both authors aestheticize eloquent silences. Jacques Derrida offers insights about the deep resonances of silence. In “Ellipsis,” he notes that what is left out of texts, the absences or “ellipses,” “redouble and consecrate” the words that remain (296). Pauses pepper Bui’s and Machado’s texts, stylistically and rhetorically, and Derrida’s conception of the ellipsis helps to ground their semiotically unstable methods. Textual blind spots, he argues, contain a “fabric of traces” for readers to decode, for “all meaning is altered by this lack” (Derrida 296). By “pronouncing non-closure,” Derrida maintains, the gaps are both “infinitely open and infinitely reflecting on [themselves]” in a Möbius strip that “redoubles” meaning. Redoubling, to Derrida, disrupts the traditional hierarchy of language, highlighting its inherent instability and ambiguity (Derrida 298). Bui and Machado use negative space as a kind of redoubling, creating the outlines of trauma such that the shape of its impact is clear, even if it cannot be looked at directly. Since they are both women whose identities are already marginalized by factors other than their trauma, they use gaps to forestall the external suppression of the traumatic experiences that further marginalize them. In an interview with Aaron Burkhalter, Bui discusses cultural silence: “my people speak in pregnant silences and don't argue. So I had to figure out how to do that in comics. It turns out that comics are actually good at showing silences.” McCloud discusses the emotional impact of silence in comics; the way silences push content into eternal and unchanging spaces, remarking,

the content of a silent panel… can produce a sense of timelessness. Because of its unresolved nature, such a panel may linger in the readers’ mind… When ‘bleeds’ are used, time is no longer contained, but instead hemorrhages and escapes into timeless space. (102)

We might look once more at Bui’s older version of herself sitting inside the panel, imagining the full-bleed image of her younger self below. The self below is trapped in timeless space, even as the author ages. This, according to Crespo and Fernández-Lansac, is how second-tier trauma memories work: “Triggered by perceptual cues,” they are “dominated by vivid sensorial details” that fragment and arrest time (149). These involuntary memories return the afflicted person against and again back to the site and conditions of the trauma. In an interview with Madi Haslam, Machado, too, discusses her aesthetic choice to use second person as a negotiation between her older self and the younger self who is doomed, when triggered by external stimuli, to repeat the traumatic memory:

I talk about this first-person Carmen—that's me—and the second-person Carmen—that's like this past version of myself that can't access any of the knowledge that I have… she is constantly turning on this hamster wheel of pain, trapped in the past… She’s stuck there forever and there's nothing I can do about it, so [using second person is] sort of honoring that wall.

Thi Bui

By taking control, visiting the scenes of trauma on their own terms, these authors perform a kind of healing scriptotherapy, which Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, in Reading Autobiography, refer to as “the process of speaking or writing about trauma in order to find words to give voice to previously repressed memories” (29). Both Bui and Machado create, gaze at, and empathize with these remembered selves who cannot speak, who are immobile within the amber of their distress. Both authors use silence to sanctify their timeless, full-bleed suffering.

Derrida conceives of the ellipsis as a tool to draw readers’ attention to what is missing in a text, suggesting there is always more to be said or thought in these textual gaps. Ellipses, being circular and recursive in nature, as well as pregnant with potential energy, challenge a linear philosophical telos. They open new, more rhizomatic structures of thought around familiar ideas as a part of Derrida’s broader project of deconstruction, which seeks to expose the hidden assumptions and biases that buttress Western epistemology. Both Bui and Machado are women of color with a specific positionality within mainstream culture, and thus their narratives are triply adulterated by the strains of dominant discourse: They are women on one hand; they are women of color on another; and finally, Bui is an immigrant and Machado is from the LGBTQ+ community. While everyone suffering unnamable trauma works within some form of narrative mediation that they must navigate and, if necessary, dismantle, immigrants and queer women of color must kick against tremendous undercurrents to be heard at all. Moreover, they are burdened with representing not only themselves but an entire category of people, balancing personal truth with the need to protect their group from harmful stereotypes. Ellipses can help, strategic silences that speak a language that is different from but complementary to the narrative. Through the differences between word and image for Bui and between a first-person narrator and a second-person self in Machado, these two women navigate memories that do not square with, or that fit uncomfortably among, existing narratives about immigrants and queer people.

The Viêt Nam war, for instance, has deeply entrenched narratives in the United States, and part of Bui’s project is redressing the “stereotypes and terrible cliches about Vietnamese people from bad Vietnam War movies” (Burkhalter). And so she must fight against calcified history in writing her historically-specific trauma. As Stella Oh observes in “Birthing a Graphic Archive of Memory: Re-Viewing the Refugee Experience in Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do,”

Rather than dehistoricizing trauma, Bui positions trauma and the material conditions of war firmly and literally on the back of the character and engages in a political project of recuperative narrativization. The graphic novel serves as a form of cartography, mapping our ways of perceiving Vietnam and the Vietnamese War in spatial and recursive modes that intervene in dominant tropes of Vietnam and representations of the war. (81)

Carmen Maria Machado

Like Bui, Machado expresses frustration that the legal and social narratives about queer people make her leery of representing the Woman in the Dream House as “the specter of the lunatic lesbian” (126), but she is compelled to write her experience because “the nature of archival silence is that certain people’s narratives and their nuances are swallowed by history” (138). Being in the double-bind of trauma on the one hand and cultural invisibility on the other compels both women to aestheticize silence, if only to keep their narratives out of the greedy grasp of pre-existing and limiting white Western heteronormative thought. God, as the old saying goes, can be glimpsed right there in the gaps.

In sum, ellipses run like electrical currents through both authors’ prose, and their texts use ellipses to explore trauma by mixing semiotic systems, in ways that correspond to Crespo and Fernández-Lansac’s two tiers of traumatic memory. Machado and Bui employ writerly techniques that, through silence, become powerful archives of traumatic memory and postmemory. Kelly Hurley’s “Trauma and Horror” argues that traditional modes of narration such as realism are inadequate for the abreaction of trauma, because it isn’t possible to render

a “true” representation of traumatic events, given that the very experience of trauma involves the derangement, even the shattering, of the subjective apparatus designed to process it. Traumatic events can only be understood belatedly and imperfectly; they give rise to repetitive dreams and uncontrollable flashbacks and generate this-is-what-happened stories characterized by disjunction and distortion. (2)

Bui and Machado’s grapplings thereby provide models of healing that acknowledge and honor breakages and fractures, sanctifying the gap between what can be spoken and what exists beyond words. Their fractured narratives, rather than smoothing over the jagged edges of trauma, choose to aestheticize the breakages as a way to honor their experiences and experientially convey them to readers. Both of them are doing something that becomes a source of empowerment for those who find their experiences outside of accepted reality: They queer the pitch, semiotically, a tactic that strikes me as a kind of écriture féminine, since women, when it comes to trauma, often have to fight tooth and claw to wrest their stories back from a dehumanizing hegemony that would prefer to smooth out, simplify, or simply erase their story from the archive.

Works Cited

Burkhalter, Aaron. “Thi Bui Brings Her Graphic Novel Memoir to Seattle for Four Days of Appearances.” The South Seattle Emerald, 8 April 2019.

Crespo, María and Violeta Fernández-Lansac. “Memory and Narrative of Traumatic Events: A Literature Review.” Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, 2016, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 149–156.

Derrida, Jacques. “Ellipsis.” Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass, U. of Chicago P., 1978, pp. 294-300.

Haslam, Madi. “The House is a Space of Living Metaphor: An Interview with Carmen Maria Machado.” MaisonNeuve, 20 Dec. 2019, Accessed 10 Dec 2022.

Hurley, Kelly. “Trauma and Horror: Anguish and Transfiguration.” English language Notes, Vol. 59, No. 2, Oct. 2021, pp. 2-8.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. HarperCollins Publishing, 1993.

Oh, Stella. “Birthing a Graphic Archive of Memory: Re-Viewing the Refugee Experience in Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do.” Melus, Vol 25, No. 4, Winter 2020, pp. 72-90.

Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, Second Edition. U. of Minnesota P., 2010.

Spelman, Sinéad. “Carmen Maria Machado's Memoir In The Dream House: Exploring Same-Sex Female Intimate Partner Abuse Through Literary Tropes.” Journal of Gender, Globalisation and Rights, No. 3, 2022.

Parsing a Secret History

Ann Cvetkovich’s “Drawing the Archive in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home”

Ann Cvetkovich situates Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home among extant criticism of other graphic memoirs—namely Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis—in the way they all concern the relationship between historical and personal trauma. Like Spiegelman, Bechdel’s text concerns a kind of family archeology, in her case undertaken by a queer child attempting to trace her queerness back to her closeted father; like Satrapi, Bechdel was an actual witness to events, and is not merely responding to the “postmemory” experienced by the next generation (Cvetkovich 113). But Cvetkovich distinguishes Bechdel’s memoir from the others for its intimate scope and emphasis on queer concerns and problematics. Where Spiegelman and Satrapi pursue precision, Bechdel generates ambiguity; where Spiegelman and Satrapi situate their stories in moments of violent political rupture, Bechdel’s family drama feels deceptively small—one might even call it claustrophobic. All three texts dramatize the difference in scale between the individual caught within the machine of vast global events and the cultural memory that occludes the personal in such events. Bechdel’s cultural rupture is an invisible one, the very violence of which is in its suppression and secrecy. She seeks to be “the sympathetic witness who can make available the rich and contradictory story of [her father’s] life so that he is something more than a pedophile, suicide, or tragic homosexual” (Cvetkovich 113). Bechdel undertakes this task for the good of the queer community, excavating the violence to self and others that comes from living a closeted life: Such suppression, the text argues, is as silently dangerous as louder, more visible cataclysms.

Cvetkovich grounds her observations in a queer theoretical frame, linking queer theory to scholars of historical trauma like Marianne Hirsch, who coined the term “postmemory” to refer to the aftereffects that haunt the children of parents who have lived through trauma. Much of Cvetkovich’s evidence is built on the interplay between image and text: She observes that the combination of words and images in all three graphic novels demonstrate “the effects of growing up in the vicinity of powerful combinations of violence and secrecy, including forms of secrecy that in the interest of protecting children’s innocence seem only to harm them” (Cvetkovich 113). For Bechdel’s text especially, the images create a “visual archive” of what only existed in secret or as symptom—the way her father’s obsession with restoration is a symptom; or his fastidiousness about appearance that he projects onto his daughter in a way that violates her autonomy. Through recreating documents and photographs in a more detailed, photorealistic sketch style than the rest of the illustrations, Bechdel “draws the evidence” in a way that both concedes a subjective read of events—the drawings are not photographs or digital reproductions of documents like they are in Spiegelman—and rhetorically separates them from the rest of the art. Bechdel uses the art to “both enhance and trouble acts of witness” (Cvetkovich 114).

Cvetkovich takes as her prime exemplar the memoir’s “centerfold,” an image of the family babysitter taken during a trip the children took with their father. Bechdel painstakingly reproduces the photograph in detailed crosshatching, but also includes her cartoony style in the form of the narrator Alison’s hands holding the photograph. This produces overlays of reality that complicate rather than simplifying. The more realistic sketch gives the artifact a greater tie to the “real world” than the personal story of Alison’s interiority, while also nodding to her father’s more baroque artistic tastes in contrast to her simple line-art. But, as Cvetkovich notes, the fact that it is hand-drawn concedes that we are not seeing an “unmediated form of vision” (114). She bathes the photograph—which may have been innocent—in an erotic glow, trying to visually imagine her father’s desire when he took the photograph of the almost naked teen lying on the bed, in the hotel room next to his children. The drawn photograph’s “visual elements—its style, composition, layout, and sequencing—underscore its emotional significance” rather than its historical veracity (Cvetkovich 115). Indeed, Cvetkovich contends that the original photograph and the hand-drawn replica tell different stories, each critical to our understanding of a complex and secret history: “Despite their differences—the photograph instantaneous, the drawing laborious; the photograph apparently truthful, the drawing achieving other kinds of verisimilitude—both serve as technologies of memory” (118). This overlay of semantic systems is central to Bechdel’s project of cultural memory’s intersection with personal experience.

Bechdel’s archive interrupts the narrative of queerness in the United States. Her combination of images and text refuses to succumb to dominant trends in “queer witnessing” that idealize and simplify. The trauma of Bechdel’s illustrated world is repressed and compacted, cramped within her father’s need to sublimate and deny, and Bechdel “airs out” the family trauma by outing a parent for whom concealment was a way of life. The graphic form is appropriate to this project, comprising an “insurgent genre” that documents events in ways that hew closer to emotional than historical truth (Cvetkovich 112).  As Cvetkovich notes:

Fun Home's queer witnessing deserves to be part of its highly successful and well-deserved reception, since it provides such a compelling challenge to celebratory queer histories that threaten to erase more disturbing and unassimilable inheritances. (126)

Cvetkovich calls this challenge to the status quo a bold move. She notes that the current state of LGBTQ  rhetoric, at least in the mainstream, is “quite willing to disavow stigmatized identities that might disrupt the clean wholesome image of gay people who just want to get married and have families” (125). Queer theory itself pushes back on this recourse to normativity.

Cvetkovich draws interesting parallels and makes compelling points about Bechdel’s archive of memory and its relationship to the inherited trauma of the closet. Having read Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, however, I can’t help but think she might have deepened her argument through an engagement with semiotics: Bechdel deliberately activates different sign systems in her visual and conceptual overlays. McCloud notes how variance along the continuum of realism/abstraction in comics affects reader’s experience of meaning in predictable ways:

By de-emphasizing the appearance of the physical world in favor of the idea of form, the cartoon places itself in the world of concepts. Through traditional realism, the comics artist can portray the world without… and through the cartoon the world within. (41)

This insight deepens Cvetkovich’s observations about the Bechdel’s assorted “technologies of memory,” and could be fruitfully applied to her “centerfold,” which shows Alison’s hands (the world within) holding a photorealistic drawing of a photograph (the world without). McCloud notes that comics offer what other media can’t, in that the reader becomes, in a sense, a collaborator. He introduces the concept of the “gutter”—the space between the panels of a cartoon—as a space at once empty and pregnant with meaning. The gutter is the interstice where readers commit “closure”: “Comics panels fracture both time and space,” he says, “offering a jagged, staccato rhythm of unconnected moments. But closure allows us to connect these moments and mentally construct a continuous, unified reality” (McCloud 67). Bechdel’s medium of choice forces readers to collaborate with its author, closing the gaps in memory, both cultural and personal, that have no closure in the real world.

Works Cited

Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home. First Mariner Books, 2007.

Cvetkovich, Ann. “Drawing the Archive in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” Women’s Studies Quarterly. Vol. 36, No. ½, Spring/Summer 2008, pp. 111-128.

Hirsch, Marianne. “Postmemory.” https://postmemory.net/, N.D., Accessed 20 Oct 2022.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. 1993.

Circles of Sorrow

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.

Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart

The Monomyth as Interior Quest and External Reckoning in Toni Morrison’s Home 

“We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it.”

— Audre Lorde, "Poetry Is Not a Luxury"

“Now that my ladder’s gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.”

— William Butler Yeats, “The Circus Animal’s Desertion”

In multiform ways, Toni Morrison’s Home parallels The Odyssey. After a pointless, protracted Trojan war, the battle-weary Odysseus ranges across the Aegean on his way home. He is beset by enemies and evils and, as in most quest tales, the hero must use his wiles to negotiate perils, overcome trials, and fight monsters to return home, a changed man. Home’s Frank Money quests through a segregated country after his own psychic fracturing as a black soldier in the “forgotten” war with Korea. Like Odysseus, he longs for hearth and home and his quest involves the rescue of a woman, in Frank’s case his fragile sister Cee, and the reintegration of his damaged heart and mind. The novel is structured, like many of Morrison’s novels (and like Joseph Campbell’s monomyth itself), as a circular hero’s journey. But Morrison’s story is shaped more like a spiral or gyre than a circle, for the physical journey across a hostile American landscape is accompanied by an inward journey from an “outside” characterized by the jagged, broken fragments of the hero’s life to the painful center of his psyche—the space where he can finally incorporate outer and inner.

The home Frank seeks is less a physical space than a psychological one. Morrison employs and complicates the structure of the ancient epic in order to challenge the linear storytelling, linear history, linear ideas of progress, and other discourses of linearity so prevalent in the white Western world (and so suppressive of other epistemological modes)—forms it has used to commit atrocities against its cultural “others.” Living black in a racist country that obfuscates its racism with fraudulent national narratives, she implies, prevents healing for the black American. In this spiralized hero’s journey, “home” is a space of self-definition, a reconnection with earlier modes of healing (such as ritual) and a space where witnesses help reclaim a hijacked personal narrative. In a sense, Morrison’s novel is metafictional in that it models how stories themselves are a form of healing, especially when they act as crosscurrents to damaging dominant narratives that contribute to ongoing trauma.

Home as a Hero’s Journey

In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell explores the archetype of the “hero’s Journey,” and the way epics such as The Odyssey engage similar themes of transformation and arrival all over the world. He envisions this monomyth as a shared human patrimony, a vast subterranean river of human experience, from which all creativity is drawn, and “through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into the human cultural manifestation.” Indeed, he believes that all mythology is “the same, beneath its variety of costume.” The first stage of Campbell’s circular hero’s journey is the “call to adventure” (Campbell 1-2, 28). Home begins with Frank Money, rambling at loose ends a year after his discharge from the army where he fought the United States’ war with Korea. He suffers PTSD. He is tortured by flashbacks and hallucinations and is consequently prone to alcohol abuse, to quiet the noise of the war, and his blackouts get him into trouble. One such event has landed him in hospital, drugged and chained to a bed, and that is how we find him at the opening of the novel’s events. A savvy reader might note that Odysseus, too, is imprisoned and in thrall on Kalypso’s island at the commencement of The Odyssey. Morrison has deliberately placed Frank in a mythopoetic space. The narrative reveals that he has just received what could be thought of as “the call to adventure:” A letter from a stranger, simply saying, “Come fast. She be dead if you tarry” (Morrison 8). We don’t know who “she” could be nor whom the note is from, but it spurs our hero to action, urging him to escape the hospital, as a visit from a messenger god might do in an ancient epic.

Nor do the resonances between Home and Homer’s epic stop there. The Odyssey’s capricious gods are in Morrison’s novel represented by the “tyrant-monsters” of American racism and capitalism: Frank must journey across a hostile land full of random police violence, murderous racists, the ever-present need for money to travel and keep oneself alive, and the demons in his own soul. The second thread to Homer’s epic is Penelope, the woman who has been left behind to keep the household, and she has an analogue in Morrison’s tale too. Ycidra (“Cee”) is still rather close to their hometown of Lotus, Georgia (a town Frank joined the army to escape, for the “fifty or so houses and two churches” do not feel like home for him), where she waits. When we first meet her, she is bemoaning her abandonment on multiple fronts, by a faithless husband, a villainous grandmother, and a brother too damaged to return. Cee is naïve and fragile in her own estimation, and we see that even she knows that Frank’s rescue might not be in her own interests, for she tells herself that “where her brother had been, she had no defense. That’s the other side, she thought, of having a smart, tough brother close at hand to take care of and protect you—you are slow to develop your own brain muscle” (Morrison 48). Her life is marked by waiting, just as Frank’s is marked by his inward/outward journey. Like it does with Odysseus and Penelope, the narrative nudges them toward one another. But it is not until Cee undergoes a harrowing trauma at the hands of a doctor whose evil smacks of Josef Mengele that the hero is finally jolted out of his self-involved stupor to initiate the quest. This, we discover, is the letter that calls him to action.  

In “Flying Home: A Mode of Conversion in the African American Context,” Jay-Paul Hinds discusses the introduction of African folklore to a literature rife with Eurocentric epic traditions, and its specific emphasis on African and African-American journeys being necessarily roundtrip. Joseph Campbell writes of universal themes, and these are not contradicted but rather refined or made more specific by Hinds. He writes of the “canon of latent folktales that modern writers are attempting to bring back to African American consciousness,” in which the hero escapes his suffering by flying away, and then, struck by conscience, returns home armed with supernatural aid to help those still suffering. Home is full of this kind of circle, albeit metaphorical rather than supernatural—a desire to escape, followed by a wrestling with virtue and a final resolve to return to help those still in need. As Hinds notes, “flying is a mode of religious conversion… that has enabled African Americans to come in touch with supernatural resources during times of sociopolitical, communal, and personal sorrow” (383). Morrison engages the European epic but inflects it strongly with African folkloric modes in order to model a hybrid form of healing that black Americans can use to repair themselves and one another after centuries of systemic sociopolitical damage. Frank has been to war, and war is traumatic, but his return to a racist country after serving in an integrated army means he is cut off from the healing resources available to other veterans; Cee is traumatized by an act of purposeless violence to her body, but the fact the violence is perpetrated by an authority figure whose job it is to care for the vulnerable renders her voiceless. It is no wonder that the European hero’s journey is here leavened with African storytelling tropes: Dominant narratives do not provide language enough for these heroes to give voice to their sorrows.

Maxine L. Montgomery discusses the trauma caused to black soldiers in the “forgotten war” between the United States and Korea in “Re-Membering the Forgotten War: Memory, History, and the Body in Toni Morrison’s Home.” She focuses in particular on the way it was compounded for black soldiers when they were forced to reintegrate into a hostile, racist America after the war—a different America from the one encountered by white soldiers. At the outset of the novel, Frank is grappling with his PTSD alone. He, and other black soldiers, are doubly traumatized by the hostility of a country that is happy to use them to fight abroad but leaves them alone to suffer appalling racism at home, often at the hands of those in power. According to Montgomery, their experiences with racism after the war made recovery from the trauma of it well-nigh impossible. Further, she argues that Home endeavors to expose the fraudulent narratives of the whole decade: “Morrison's comments about the need to ‘rip the scab off’ of the 1950s,” says Montgomery, “suggest the authorial effort to excavate obscure moments in our national history, reconstructing them from the vantage point of the marginalized subjects who witnessed those events firsthand” (322). Frank suffers alone; Cee, protected her whole life by her brother, does not know how to resist the white doctor who acts as though he has her best interests at heart, and then secretly sterilizes her while she is under his employ. Morrison’s heroes do not really have a home in America to return to: Their job, we learn, is to create one in their hearts and for each other.

So, Morrison complicates her European epic by chronicling experiences that are largely erased by a Western literary canon—a canon that rejects texts that don’t support its metanarratives. Her hero’s journey demonstrates the horror of being an American “Other,” having at every turn to negotiate with an American superstructure whose foundations have racism holding its masonry together (if I’m not overtaxing the metaphor). Campbell conceives of the traditional hero’s journey as circular in shape. Morrison uses this template but subverts a Eurocentric schema with characteristic narrative virtuosity: By making the journey a spiral that leads inward at the same time it moves across/around, she demonstrates how to access and speak the “unspeakable.”

The Hero’s Journey of the Heart: Healing as Inward Spiral

Morrison’s “excavations” (to borrow Montgomery’s word), especially as regards speaking the unspeakable, correspond to Judith Herman’s thesis in Trauma and Recovery; the tripartite model of the subconscious as conceptualized by Jacque Lacan; and, at the macro-level, Jean-Francois Lyotard’s theories of postmodernism, in particular his “incredulity toward metanarratives” and the concept of greater truth embodied in petit récits. Herman’s work on trauma elucidates the project of Morrison’s novel, and perhaps informs it (if only by osmosis). One of its foci is the behavior of the world surrounding the victim. Herman argues that bystanders faced with another’s trauma do whatever they can to avoid identifying with it, especially if they suspect their own complicity in its cause. The America in Morrison’s novel violently rejects the harm it has caused black people. “When the traumatic events are of human design…” writes Herman, it becomes “very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator” (7). Frank must overcome American narratives with as much vigor as he must overcome American violence. And the narrative Frank encounters most often is that despite America’s conception of itself as being a bastion of human rights—for such was its pretext for war in the 20th century—he is unwelcome and homeless in the land of his birth and nationality, despite his sacrifice overseas.  These narrative inconsistencies are compounded, moreover, by the fact that his role in the army was a reversal of his role as a citizen: In Korea he was a powerful aggressor, even a colonizer, while stateside he is an abject victim. Montgomery notes that the novel’s structure—a structure that includes a framing metaphor, resolved at the end; an inward journey that parallels the outward one; and testimonials from multiple interested parties, including two from different aspects of Frank’s psyche—is “designed to correct the troubling omissions in extant historical record” (326). Before the book’s events, there is the sketchy, impressionistic account of white men burying a black man alive, witnessed by Frank and Cee. We do not discover its significance until the end of the book, when the two are finally ready to confront and, literally, exhume the past. During his journey to find Cee after his discharge, Frank encounters black trauma and black coping strategies wherever he travels, and his psyche accumulates these strategies over time. Unlike Odysseus, Frank is not the exemplar of his culture but a stranger in his own land, accepting help from a kind of underground railroad of other marginalized Americans, and taking healing where he can get it, but persecuted at every turn and prone to violent fits of rage. Cee, too, has to negotiate a hostile world. When she is hired to clean the kindly Dr. Beauregard Scott’s office, she laments that she cannot understand the books on his bookshelf, but Morrison makes sure the reader can: “How small, how useless was her schooling, she thought, and promised herself she would find time to read about and understand ‘eugenics.’ This was a good, safe place” (65). We feel the horror of Cee’s innocence and we know before she does that the kindly doctor has evil designs. But there is no national narrative that informs about the forced sterilizations and other horrendous medical experiments of the era conducted on the bodies of black Americans without their knowledge or consent. Herman notes the difference in available narratives between the trauma of those with cultural capital as compared with those without:

Soldiers in every war, even those who have been regarded as heroes, complain bitterly that no one wants to know the real truth about war. When the victim is already devalued (a woman, a child), she may find that the most traumatic events of her life take place outside the realm of socially validated reality. Her experiences become unspeakable (8).

The white American narrative renders Frank and Cee’s experiences and trauma unspeakable, and this compounds the damage, forcing them to create their own spaces for healing through community, ritual, and the ritual reframing of their own stories. That they find a way to heal themselves in a hostile world of murderous and dehumanizing racism offers a corrective to older epic modes: This, contemporary readers note, is the definition of true heroism.

In “Symbol and Language,” Lacan’s theories of the unconscious provide a helpful visual frame for Herman’s concept of trauma. He imagines the unconscious as composed of three interlocking circles, representing the “symbolic,” the realm of language, the “imaginary,” the world of dreams and images, and the “real,” which is the unspeakable heart of us, where interior pain without a narrative can be expressed only as symptom (Lacan 171-2). Herman asserts that the biggest obstacle to healing is the refusal of others to bear witness to an individual’s trauma, for it’s so scary to be confronted with a chaotic world and/or to be implicated in another’s pain that it is often easier to identify with the perpetrator than the victim, which is anathema to the victim’s healing. This builds off Lacan’s contention that healing is the transfer of the “real” (the unspeakable) to the “imaginary” and the “symbolic.” In an early episode in Home, Frank is speaking to the Reverend John Locke, who is the first in the novel to put words to an unspeakable reality: “‘You go fight, come back, they treat you like dogs. Change that. They treat dogs better’” (Morrison 18). This is the novel’s first transference of the real to the symbolic. In a later episode in the book, Frank stops in a jazz club and witnesses a kind of “speaking the unspeakable” through music: “After Hiroshima, the musicians understood as early as anyone that Truman’s bomb changed everything and only scat and bebop could say how” (Morrison 108). This encounter can be seen as a transfer of the unspeakable into the imaginary space of music. Frank’s drinking and violence and nightmares, meanwhile, are the symptoms that do not heal him. He survives on the scraps of healing he encounters until he has enough inner resources to face himself. Cee’s naivete and credulousness are symptoms, while her friendship with the Scott’s maid, Sarah—who, it is later revealed, sends the note to Frank that is the novel’s precipitating event—is her first inkling of her own value, a first step in the process of self-reclamation through the imaginary that must continue later in the book. Sarah’s willingness to stand up to the doctor so that Frank can carry a critically damaged Cee out of his office demonstrates the indispensability of allies who see and recognize unspeakable trauma. Morrison’s novel forces Frank and Cee face-to-face with their pain so they can move their unspeakable “real” into the realm of the symbolic through language and a narrative (as in Frank’s case); and into the realm of the imaginary through ritual and self-reliance (as in Cee’s case).

Lyotard is notoriously difficult to parse, but instructive in revealing the larger superstructural conditions that give rise to the trauma of marginalized citizens. Morrison engages some of his theories of postmodernism, which, in The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard defines as a studied “incredulity toward metanarratives” (8). Where Herman and Lacan form the basis of an individual’s healing, Lyotard is concerned with the relationship between power and reality, and he examines these phenomena on the national and cultural scale. He argues that metanarratives or “grand narratives” always, by definition, serve the interests of the powerful at the expense of the marginalized. Herman discusses the consequences of this, for “The more powerful the perpetrator, the greater is his prerogative to name and define reality, and the more completely his arguments will prevail,” and so, in her estimation,

The systematic study of psychological trauma… depends on the support of a political movement… The study of war trauma becomes legitimate only in a context that challenges the sacrifice of young men in war. The study of trauma in sexual and domestic life becomes legitimate only in a context that challenges the subordination of women and children (8-9).

To promote the dismantling of grand narratives, Lyotard proposes the aggregation of “petit récits,” or “little narratives,” in which all stakeholders in history add their story, even (or especially) if it contradicts the grand- or metanarrative of the nation or culture, or if it emanates from those with limited power within the system. The more limited the subject’s power, Lyotard argues, the more we should aim to amplify her story. He proposes wresting the story from the “authorities” in order to refine “our sensitivity to differences and [reinforce] our ability to tolerate the incommensurable. Its principle is not the expert’s homology, but the inventor’s paralogy.” (Lyotard 37-8). I argue that Morrison’s project is exactly this kind of petit récit: She is an inventor extraordinaire, modeling a paralogical method of healing in the face of a rigid, self-perpetuating “reality-logic” crafted, maintained, and jealously guarded by the dominant culture.

Donald E. Pease explicates the specific paradoxes of the 1950s American narrative in his article “The Uncanny Return of Settler-Colonial Capitalism in Toni Morrison’s Home,” in which the contradictory messaging of postwar rhetoric is made doubly unheimlich for the black returning soldiers who are forced to occupy the no-man’s-land between rhetoric and reality. Pease discusses Morrison’s omissions of Cold War philosophy, and the way her omission highlights the contrast between propaganda and fact:

Morrison confronts readers with a comparably uncanny experience when she deletes from the narrative any trace of the Cold War ideology whose structures of feeling, epistemologies, and military architecture the Korean War was putatively fought to establish… After the newly formed Department of Defense described the United States as an anti-racist state charged with safeguarding liberal humanity from “Communist slavery,” racial desegregation emerged as an essential component of the U.S. effort to win the hearts and minds of populations in Korea and across the decolonizing world (Pease 50).

But of course the reality of American racism in the 1950s belies this propaganda in uncanny ways, and black veterans must navigate the wide gap between them as yet another obstacle to overcome. Morrison’s decision to elide the “polarizing dichotomies sedimented within the Cold War frame” shines paradoxical light on them while also “disintersecting race from other articulations of power” and shuttering “the white supremacist gaze that would have employed these perspectives to place Frank under the control of the carceral state” (Pease 53). Morrison’s choices are self-conscious, as she makes plain in an interview for Interview magazine:

Was that what [the 1950s] was really like?… it tends to be seen in this Doris Day or Mad Men-type of haze… Somebody was hiding something—and by somebody, I mean the narrative of the country, which was so aggressively happy… And I kept thinking, This kind of insistence, there’s something fake about it (qtd. in Pease 50).

So, contending with national lies and interior disquiet, Frank’s journey leads him from Seattle to Georgia on a rescue mission, but it also leads him closer and closer to a truth that is central to him and his unspeakable “real.” For Frank, too, is “hiding something.” It is the voiceless lacuna at the center of the spiral into his psyche, and it drives his rescue mission, his drunk blackouts, the fights he gets into, and everything else, until he can finally admits it to himself.

The narrative takes its time zeroing into this central truth. Morrison structures his narrative in two strata: A third-person omniscient narrator tells the story of Frank that the world sees, but a parallel first-person, present tense, stream-of-consciousness monologue occasionally intrudes on the third person narrative, sometimes chastising or contradicting it:

Korea.
You can’t imagine it because you weren’t there. You can’t describe the bleak landscape because you never saw it. First let me tell you about the cold. I mean cold. More than freezing, Korea cold hurts, clings like a kind of glue you can’t peel off (93).

Slowly this narrative corrects the other, more rehearsed one, in the psychomachic manner of a man debating himself. In this space, Frank tells us of the little Korean girl who foraged for garbage to eat left behind by the soldiers. As she forages one day and Frank observes a soldier confronting her as she holds a rotten orange. She “reaches for the soldier’s crotch, touches it. It surprises him. Yum-yum? As soon as I look away from her hand to her face, see the two missing teeth, the fall of black hair above eager eyes, he blows her away” (Morrison 95). This revelation comes three quarters of the way through the novel and coincides with a lessening of nightmares and hallucinations for Frank: His ability to put words to the trauma begin to move his experiences and guilt from the realm of the real to the realm of the symbolic.

The Round-Trip Flight: Metafictional Collectivity

Frank and Cee go to Lotus, the final stop in their odyssey. What happens there comprises the “home” of the novel’s title, but it is also operating on a metafictional level, modeling a way to approach trauma and recovery for marginalized people whose stories might be outside of officially-sanctioned reality. When they arrive it is not yet clear whether Cee will survive the experimental surgery performed on her by Dr. Scott. But the town closes around brother and sister in ways they were not expecting and comes to represent the community that traumatized people need to heal. Cee is whisked away to recover while Frank does odd jobs here and there to keep himself busy. Contrary to his memories of it, the town has grown benevolent in his estimation:

It was so bright, brighter than he remembered. The sun, having sucked away the blue from the sky, loitered there in a white heaven, menacing Lotus, torturing its landscape, but failing, failing, constantly failing to silence it: children still laughed, ran, shouted their games; women sang in their backyards while pinning wet sheets on clotheslines; occasionally a soprano was joined by a neighboring alto or tenor just passing by (Morrison 117).

We see contemporary trauma therapy at work in Frank’s recounting of trauma throughout the novel, the apotheosis of which occurs in Lotus. And we see it in the healing rituals practiced by the women who aid in Cee’s recovery, for a group of local women take immediate, unsentimental control of Cee’s healing, and every woman in the neighborhood bands together to prevent Frank from seeing his sister for two months. When they allow him entry, “Two months surrounded by country women who loved mean had changed her. The women handled sickness as though it were an affront, an illegal, invading braggart who needed whipping” (Morrison 121). They express scorn toward the patient and handle her ungently. They force her to engage in “sun-smacking,” which meant “spending at least one hour a day with her legs spread open to the blazing sun. Each woman agreed that that embrace would rid her of any remaining womb sickness” (125). She is skeptical of the ritual, but she recovers, and after she recovers, the women grow gentle. One of them tells her, “‘Nothing and nobody is obliged to save you but you… Don’t let… no devil doctor decide who you are. That’s slavery. Somewhere inside you is that free person I’m talking about. Locate her and let her do some good in the world” to which Cee replies, “I ain’t going nowhere… this is where I belong” (Morrison 126). According to Herman, a community willing to bear witness but also to allow the survivor to wend her own way toward recovery is key to healing trauma. Since “the core experiences of psychological trauma are disempowerment and disconnection from others,” then the survivor needs to establish new connections, and then needs to find her own story: Indeed, “The first principle of recovery is the empowerment of the survivor. She must be the author and arbiter of her own recovery” (Herman 133). Frank wants to save her like he always has, so the women drive him away and teach her self-reliance. Ultimately, it is Cee, with the scales of naivete fallen from her eyes and a new, fledgling sense of herself as the agent of her own saving, who rescues him, though she never knows it.

For Cee has come to understand something about her relationship with Frank: “While his devotion shielded her, it did not strengthen her… she wanted to be the one who rescued her own self.” When she openly weeps in front of him, she then refuses the “don’t cry” he always gives her when she is suffering, answering, “I can be miserable if I want to… I’m not going to hide from what’s true just because it hurts” (Morrison 129-131). Her resolve, and her grief, and her bravery in facing the child she can never have who haunts her dreams, inspire him to finally face the black hole within him. For he, too, is haunted by a child. He confesses to himself, or to his chronicler, in the italics reserved for his interstitial corrections:

I have to say something to you right now… I lied to you and I lied to me…
I shot the Korean girl in the face.
I am the one she touched.
I am the one who saw her smile.
I am the one she said “Yum-yum” to.
I am the one she aroused (Morrison 133).

Frank has been experiencing a dissociation from events common to combat veterans. Herman notes that in combat it is

not merely the exposure to death but rather the participation in meaningless acts of malicious destruction that rendered men most vulnerable to lasting psychological damage… [many soldiers] admit to committing atrocities that haunt them, with which they bludgeon themselves, and which prevent their recovery, since recovery requires forgiveness. These soldiers often do not want to forgive themselves (54).

After admitting the unspeakable to himself, Frank and Cee can begin to live. They are home, physically and spiritually, despite a country that endeavors to dispossess black Americans at every turn. In the final pages of the book the siblings disinter the black man they saw being buried, and they uncover the mystery of what happened to him: It was a kidnapped black father and son, forced to fight to the death, wherein the father sacrificed himself so the son could survive. He wasn’t dead yet when the white men who arranged the battle royale buried him. Morrison dramatizes the personal search for modes of healing, but the final revelation places the story in a larger context of racialized violence, and she clearly intends her novel to be read metatextually as well. Irene Vissar observes how Home is structured as a metatextual argument in “Entanglements of Trauma: Relationality and Toni Morrison’s Home.” Specifically, she notes that the theme of psychologically confronting trauma “is foregrounded in the novel by the structural device of the frame narrative: Frank, the traumatized war veteran, relates his personal story to a listener, who is the (nameless and faceless) author of his written text” (8). But when he takes back the story, he reclaims his own narrative as though it has been kidnapped (which indeed it has). The testimonial, according to Vissar and Herman, is what is used now to reconstruct and address collective trauma, like the trauma suffered by black Americans from many hundreds of years of oppression and metanarrative obfuscation. Morrison demonstrates the need for community and solidarity in recovery as well as a silent witness, and she emphasizes the crucial role of stories in the rebuilding of damaged psyches. Frank’s interstitial first-person accounts that correct for the omniscient narrator’s incorrect assumptions read like oral reclamation of written untruths, and, according to Visser, “orality and rituals function as catalysts in processes of mourning and grieving in the aftermath of traumatic events” (3). When we leave Frank and Cee, they are facing the world as agents of change themselves, committed to correcting ancient wrongs and fully responsible for themselves and those around them. They have made a roundtrip journey back to Lotus, and unlike the denizens of the land of lotus-eaters in The Odyssey, Lotus is the town where they doff their enforced forgetting and embrace their warts-and-all truths.

In “Dystopia, Utopia, and ‘Home’ in Toni Morrison’s Home,” Mark A. Tabone, like Pease, is concerned with how Morrison exposes the 1950s American utopia (still popular among American conservatives) as a dystopia: Her novel presents a “demythologizing dystopian portrayal of 1950s America,” and in her rendering “she rejects nostalgia and escap­ism to posit utopia not as an ideal or blueprint, or primarily as a space, but instead as concrete, and ‘endless,’ ethical practice” (Tabone 292). He connects the testimony of Frank and Cee—a process that contributes to their personal healing—with the demythologizing force of such testimony,

in which mutually exclusive versions of history are implicitly placed in confrontation in order to stress the fact that the past is not a set of established truths in which all further developments originate, but rather a contested site of cultural codes, each designed to preserve (or efface) a particular version of cultural and national identity (Tabone 297).

In other words, their petit récits fly in the face of America’s national narrative about its own history and purity. The novel is a potential model for other Americans similarly damaged by racism, marginality, violence, and trauma to help themselves and one another. Herman and Lacan are psychologists, but their theories of recovery engage aspects of narratology: Trauma therapy integrates aspects of storytelling—or rather of story reclamation. Morrison is a storyteller, but her novel integrates many aspects of psychology, so much so that the book itself becomes a kind of survival manual for dealing with systemic problems and a political and economic landscape that has virtually no interest in personal psychological health. By setting her story at once in a specific place and time in American history but also engaging aspects of Campbell’s monomyth, she universalizes a method of building identity and course-correcting an off-the-rails life in a world beset by angry, capricious, and unjust gods, even if those gods are your own country’s government, citizens, propaganda, and its greedy, ravenous capitalism. 

Flying (and Sailing) Home

When I read Toni Morrison, I often find myself haunted by the opening lines of William Butler Yeats’ “Second Coming,” a poem written early in his career: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer,” and the final lines from a poem he wrote at the end of his career, “The Circus Animal’s Desertion:” “Now that my ladder’s gone, / I must lie down where all the ladders start / In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.” Even European poets have long evoked the gyre in mystical ways that fly (so to speak) in the face of rational history and linear time. Writing this, I find my mind again and again touch the lines from these European antecedents. But I’m also breathless about Morrison’s deployment of these rich symbols through their fusion with non-European forms, such as the African legend of “flying home.” Perhaps it is the rich ringed veins of poetry that travel around and unite the world, correcting for the dark grand narratives of history. Or maybe Audre Lorde put it best in “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” when she avers that

within structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were meant to kneel to thought as [women] were meant to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets… we have hidden [our pain and] our power. They lie in our dreams, and it is our dreams that point the way to freedom. They are made realizable through our poems that give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak (37).

In my mind, Morrison’s novels are birds, circling in disquieted loops around the imperfect, ecstatic, guilty, loving, damaged human heart. They reject cant. They orbit a problem, a moment of rupture, and their circles avoid and then finally confront that rupture. Rather than a widening gyre, her gyres lead inward toward an exhumation of buried tragedy so that tragedy can be sun-smacked. Odysseus had Ithaka to which he could sail home and lay claim. Frank and Cee, denied that kind of homecoming, create their own internal home. Morrison pairs trauma theory with the traditional hero’s journey—and African mythologies as explored by Hinds specifically within Campbell’s template—to model a hybrid form of healing that runs against the grain of the American metanarrative. The Korean war backdrop dramatizes the double-trauma experienced by black soldiers in an integrated army who must return to a segregated America. And the structure of the novel is, in many ways, its primary argument: In using the frame of the testimonial, Morrison models a theory of trauma and recovery for all black Americans who live in a country that has mechanized the systematic erasure of their stories. 

Works Cited

Campbell, Joseph. “The Monomyth” & “The Adventure of the Hero.” The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 3rd Edition, New World Library, 2008, pp. 1-74.

Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. Perseus Books Group, 1997.

Hinds, Jay-Paul. “Flying Home: A Mode of Conversion in the African American Context.” Pastoral Psychology, Vol. 69, Issue 4, Aug 2020, pp. 383-404.

Lacan, Jacques. “Symbol and Language.” The Language of the Self. The Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1956.

Lorde, Audre. “Poetry is Not a Luxury.” Sister Outsider, The Crossing Press, 1993, pp. 36-9.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. U. of Minnesota Press, 1979.

Montgomery, Maxine L. “Re-Membering the Forgotten War: Memory, History, and the Body in Toni Morrison’s Home.” CLA Journal, Vol. 55, No. 4, Jun 2012, pp. 320-334.

Morrison, Toni. Home. Vintage International, 2012.

Pease, Donald E. “The Uncanny Return of Settler-Colonial Capitalism in Toni Morrison’s Home.” Boundary 2, Vol 47, No. 2, 2020, pp. 49-70.

Tabone, Mark A. “Dystopia, Utopia, and ‘Home’ in Toni Morrison’s Home.” Utopian Studies, Vol. 29, No. 3, 2018, pp. 291-308.

Vissar, Irene. “Entanglements of Trauma: Relationality and Toni Morrison’s Home.” Postcolonial Text, Vol. 9, No. 2, 2014, pp. 1-21.

Yeats, William Butler. “The Second Coming” and “The Circus Animal’s Desertion.” The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, pp. 187, 346.

Feminism's Uncertainty Principle

In the 1970s, my mother wore do-rags, men’s trousers and no bra. She breast-fed my little sister in public. Her legs were unshaven. She was outspoken about the subjugation of women, and spoke with embarrassing nonchalance about the pill, Fear of Flying and female sexuality. I adored my mother. But when I was a teenager, her uniform-like brand of feminism began to mortify me. I didn’t understand until later that my mother was rejecting the gender expectations she carried from her family, that as a woman she existed to be merely decorative. Her feminism was appropriate to her context, inappropriate to mine.

By the time I was politically aware, forcing myself into the shape of my mother’s feminism seemed as claustrophobic as my mother felt in pancake makeup and a beehive. Her feminism seemed to promote agitation for agitation’s sake, not as a means to social change. I also found that it equated strength with masculinity, which seemed a self-defeating paradox. When I became a young adult, I adopted the left-wing-yet-politically-inactive affect of practiced, erudite cynicism, like my other “Generation X” compatriots.

I am older now, and hopefully wiser, but I still cringe inwardly when I come across essays such as Jane Gallop’s “Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment.” My mind rebels against her whiny, narcissistic meanness, even as I agree in part with her thesis. She argues that a woman, by definition, cannot be guilty of sexual harassment because sexual harassment is a symptom of male domination. It occurs in societies where men wield institutionalized power over women. As a feminist issue, it concerns gender, not power. “Feminists took up the issue because we saw it as a form of sex discrimination,” says Gallop, “but sexual harassment is increasingly understood as having no necessary link to either discrimination or gender” (844). Though Gallop makes a compelling point, I recoil from the idea that she, as a feminist, is morally pure by definition, and thus beyond reproach. I show the article to my mother, who, at sixty-five, is dignified, beautiful, and scholarly (I cannot now imagine what ever embarrassed me about her). She dons her reading glasses, scans the essay, and shakes her head sadly. “I wish it was easier to like Gallop,” she says, “but she is doing feminists a disservice. She is using her position of authority to excuse her own bad behavior. That’s just what men do.”

View fullsize

And so I begin to rethink my prejudices about feminism. After all, fundamental rights such as suffrage, property ownership, and access to education are luxuries purchased for me by the activism of previous generations of feminists. My mother’s generation championed sexual liberation, acknowledged gender-based wage discrepancies and began to tackle such endemic social problems as sexual assault and sexual harassment in the workplace. So I cannot credit my reaction to Gallop’s essay to a distaste for feminism itself. What bothers me is that Gallop has not evolved along with feminism, which has been evolving since long before she was born and will continue to evolve when I am no longer here to critique her. There is an unfortunate and specifically contemporary distortion of feminism—and sexual harassment, and many other formerly noble civil rights movements—wherein the creation of oppressors and victims has taken on more importance than their elimination, and where the “oppressed” need take no responsibility for their actions. In the past, when women were subject to draconian and hypocritical moral laws, a respite from responsibility might have served us well. In 1994, Gallop’s essay does not.

View fullsize

Gallop uses a feminist pretext to exonerate herself from charges of sexual harassment filed against her by her own graduate students. This motive would be suspicious even if she disclosed the nature of the offenses. That she remains secretive about them discredits her further. In her own argument, she cannot possibly be wrong because she is a feminist. Now that feminists are faculty members, “…students can experience their feminist teachers as having power over them. And that makes it possible to imagine a feminist teacher as a sexual harasser” (841). Her gender and her job are cited as evidence in her favor, though it is clear, even to a reader who has read no other accounts of the charges, that she has abused her power. Gallop weakens her valid points about the dangers of turning harassment into a gender-neutral issue by arrogantly excusing herself from any misconduct. She has taken on the posture of male hegemony. Her behavior imitates the most shameful qualities of the oppressor.

In our society, it is still a fact that women are at a physiological and economic disadvantage. They are more vulnerable to sexual attack and coercion. The combination of men’s physiology and their social position makes them more likely to be sexual harassers—and get away with it—than women. Gallop takes issue with the law and the public for refusing to distinguish between the genders. We cannot pretend that men and women have equal faculty to exploit one another, but we also should not pretend that women are incapable of abusing their authority. An abuse of power is what it is, whoever the perpetrator. Until there is true equality, and despite the inefficiency of such measures, our current world calls for separate offenses to be named separately.

Women are granted unprecedented equality by sexual harassment laws. The legal definition of sexual harassment, according to The United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission notes that, “…the victim as well as the harasser may be a woman or a man.” Gallop and I reject this definition of sexual harassment. Audre Lorde, in her essay “Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference”, says succinctly, “…it is… not black lesbians who are assaulting women and raping children in our community…” (122). But if I want justice, I am obliged to practice what I preach. Lorde is not saying that black lesbians cannot commit abuses, just that they are less likely to commit certain kinds of abuses. We all must decide through common sense what is too intangible—too subtly shaded—to write into law.  “Too often,” says Lorde, “we pour the energy needed for recognizing and exploring difference into pretending those differences… do not exist…” (115).

Legal definitions, though indispensable, will always lag behind. They are not substitutes for truth and should not hold back the progress of thought. Over the last 200 years, feminism has changed on a decade-by-decade basis. For the first fifth of the 20th century, women couldn’t vote. Now one can earn a degree in Women’s Studies from most universities. This is progress, from a feminist standpoint. Now we move on to the next issue, and the law must eventually, clumsily follow. In physics, an electron’s position and momentum cannot be simultaneously ascertained, and likewise the definition of feminism is subject to its own “uncertainty principle:” when we define it, we change it. We must understand the limitations of a single definition, and we must even more elegantly and humbly sidestep the pitfalls of legal definitions. In fact, the only definition we can apply with any certainty to feminism is that it is a messy, evolving business that must change constantly as values and priorities change, and, most importantly, as goals are achieved.

My mother knows this. She puts Gallop’s essay aside as she orders her fish, asking the waitress fifteen questions about how ethically it was caught. She is pretty in a blue Chinese silk blouse and slim black slacks. She no longer needs the “uniform” of 70s feminism to know that she is a feminist. She is not fragile and vulnerable, and she is not a bully. “Feminism’s in your hands now,” she jokes. She is not wrong.

I would like to save feminism from both the oppression of institutionalized sexism and from those, like Gallop, who would sully feminism by committing abuses in its name. It is time for a more evolved definition of feminism, one that accounts for the inherent uncertainty involved in defining itself. Our objective is equality, our enemy is the inequality that still exists, and our challenge is to be ethical people without an exact blueprint for what an ethical person is. We cannot use the standards set up for us by our oppressors. Lorde puts it beautifully when she notes “…the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (123). Women have not yet achieved parity with men. Such parity is my task, and the task of future generations of feminists.

Cited Sources­­­

Gallop, Jane. “Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment.” The Examined Life. Class Handout. 839-845

Lorde, Audre. “Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference.” Sister Outsider. New York: The Crossing Press, 1984

U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission EEOC, 28 Feb 2007
http://www.eeoc.gov/types/sexual_harassment.html

Swigart, Jane. Personal Interview. 5 March, 2007