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Circling Meaning in Toni Morrison's "Sula"

Author(s): Claude Pruitt

Source: African American Review , Spring/Summer 2011, Vol. 44, No. 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2011), pp. 115-129

Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of African American Review (St. Louis University)

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Claude Pruitt

Circling Meaning in Toni Morrison's Sula

Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens. - Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Circles" (1841)

But that's getting too far ahead of the story, almost to the end, although the end is in the beginning and lies far ahead. - Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)

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. - Toni Morrison, Sula (1973)

[A] bove all it is necessary to read and reread those in whose wake I write, the "books" in whose margins and between whose lines I mark out and read a text simultaneously almost identical and entirely other. . . . - -Jacques Derrida, Positions (1980)

Twenty-five own martyred years life after as she the walks death to of the Sula nursing Peace, home Nel Green to visit recalls Sula's the grandmother. cycle of her own martyred life as she walks to the nursing home to visit Sula's grandmother. During the visit, she learns that Eva knows the most painful secret of her childhood, which she and Sula have closely kept. When Eva tells her that she and Sula are "just alike," Nel recoils in anger and embarrassment. She runs from the nursing home to Sula's grave and there faces her own complicity in the death of the litde boy known as Chicken Litde (163-71). Leaving the grave, Nel suddenly stops:

"Sula?" she whispered, gazing at the tops of the trees. "Sula?" Leaves stirred; mud shifted; there was the smell of overripe green things. A soft ball of

fur broke and scattered like dandelion spores in the breeze. "All that time, all that time, I thought I was missing Jude." And the loss pressed down

on her chest and came up into her throat. "We was girls together," she said as though explaining something. "O Lord, Sula," she cried, "girl, girl, girlgirlgirl."

It was a fine cry - loud and long - but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow. (174)

The scene actually begins in the chapter "1937" as Nel, betrayed by Sula and aban- doned by Jude, cowers in her bathroom:

Nel waited. Waited for the oldest cry. A scream not for others, not in sympathy for a burnt child, or a dead father, but a deeply personal cry for one's own pain. A loud, strident: "Why me?" She waited. The mud shifted, the leaves stirred, the smell of overripe green things enveloped her and announced the beginnings of her very own howl.

But it did not come. (108)

That scream does not come for twenty-seven years. In the interim, her repressed scream takes the form of a "litde ball of fur and string and hair always floating in the light," which Nel refuses to face. She believes that the ball represents her memory of Jude; actually it shields her from admitting that Sula is the real loss. Knowing that her grief for Jude will pass and that its passing will be her private hell, Nel fastens her attention on the details of this new life. When she refuses to look at the ball all

summer, her agony fades, but it will not entirely disappear (108-09). By the chapter "1940" Nel's psychological survival has taken the form of moth-

erly martyrdom. She refuses to depend on her parents, and assuming both male and female roles, works where Jude had worked and cares for his abandoned children.

African American Rew'ew44.1-2 (Spring/Summer 201 1): 1 15-129 © 201 1 Claude Pruitt 115

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Moored by "[v]irtue, bleak and drawn," she visits Sula's deathbed - ostensibly the good woman visiting a sick member of the community, she wants to know why Sula had betrayed their friendship and destroyed her marriage. She leaves "embarrassed, irritable, and a little bit ashamed," but no closer to resolution (138-46). Nel notifies the authorities that "a Miss Peace" has died at 7 Carpenter's Road, and attends Sula's funeral when the rest of the Bottom will not (172-73). In the years following Sula's death, Nel

pinned herself into a tiny life. ... It didn't take long, after Jude left, for her to see what the future would be. She had looked at their children and knew in her heart that that would be

all. That they were all she would ever know of love. . . and years ago they had begun to look past her face into the nearest stretch of sky. (1 65)

This leaves Nel feeling righteous, but empty. The final scene of the novel resolves Nel's estrangement from Sula, but it brings no healing closure; Sula is dead, Nel can only mourn. With the loss of Sula, Nel has lost herself, the "me" which Nel could not admit and which Sula refused to give up (28, cf. 143). Nel's cry is not the end of grief, but its beginning; anticipating the last lines of the novel, that grief will multiply in "circles and circles of sorrow."

In completing the loop of this circle of sorrow, and by emphasizing the plurality of the áreles of sorrow, Morrison throws into relief the fact that Sula is metanarrative, a story about stories.1 These include all of the stories contained within the text of Sula , and as I will argue, a set of foundational texts upon which Sula is written in a kind of postmodern palimpsest. As my title would suggest, the present effort does not seek a direct reading of the novel; rather, by reading iteratively, in circles through Morrison's text, I seek to point to subtexts and intertextual inferences taking shape.2 If, as Jean-François Lyotard argues, the "business" of postmodernism is "not to supply reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be represented" (91), then Valerie Smith has suggested the technique by which postmodern narra- tives achieve this business: by "circling the subject," by treating culturally pressing subjects through narrative representation of their results or effects (342-43). Taking her cue from twentieth-century psychoanalysis, Morrison calls this speaking the unspeakable: "[t]he subliminal, the underground life of the novel," she asserts, "is the area most likely to link arms with the reader and facilitate making it one's own" ("Unspeakable" 161). The essentialist experience, beyond the knowledge of anyone but she who lives it, is approached indirectly: via narrative circles, marking the site of essential experience - by drawing its outlines not in direct discourse, but by circum- locution, by circumscribing what for the reader is the absence of experience. Meaning begins to take shape within the mind of the reader as silent centers of unspoken, unspeakable experience coalesce with the reader's own, equally essential, experience. I take such an understanding to be necessary for a close reading of Sula and argue not that circles exist within Morrison's text (which is patendy obvious), but rather that they are the carriers of meaning.3 Sula's circles of sorrow mark the site of black women's history at the center of black community, a center that had been denigrated and lost within black culture and was, as Morrison seems to indicate, in serious need of re-vision.4

Published in 1973, and Morrison's second novel, Sula opens with the absence of a black community that has died at the whim of the white community. Morrison begins with a description of the Bottom as it had been and immediately both populates and personifies the Bottom:

[0]n quiet days people in valley houses could hear singing sometimes, banjos sometimes, and, if a valley man happened to have business up in those hills ... he might see a dark woman in a flowered dress doing a bit of cakewalk, a bit of black bottom, a bit of "messing around" to the lively notes of a mouth organ. Her bare feet would raise the saffron dust that floated down on the coveralls and bunion-split shoes of the man breathing music in and out of

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his harmonica. The black people watching her would laugh and rub their knees, and it would be easy for the valley man to hear the laughter and not notice the adult pain that rested somewhere under the eyelids, somewhere under their head rags and soft felt hats, some- where in the palm of the hand, somewhere behind the frayed lapels, somewhere in the sinew's curve. ... [T] he pain would escape him even though the laughter was part of the pain. (4)

The black community came to be here, so the story goes, through a "nigger joke." A slave had been promised bottom land by a white farmer in return for a difficult service. When the task was completed, the farmer, not wanting to part with good valley land, convinced the black man that the hills were "the bottom of Heaven" - paradise, more desirable than productive land in the valley. This is the "nigger joke," the patendy ridiculous inversion of truth that, if it does not explain the topsy-turvy world of racism, social marginalization, and economic exclusion, at least provides cold comfort when laughter is the only alternative to despair. Although the Bottom was not much, it was theirs - at least until Medallion needed a golf course. In the space of a few hundred words, Morrison completes one of the "circles of sorrow" from which Sula is crafted, transforms place into character, and captures the essence of Jim Crow America.

The chapters following this prologue weave a complex narrative in great circles which encompass seventy years of life and death in the Bottom and enclose an apocryphal cast of characters. The central one hundred pages ("1922" through "1940") contain the coming-of-age story and adult relationship of Nel Wright and Sula Peace. The girls form an intense relationship in response to the pressures exerted on them by community and family. They become friends, pardy so that each can escape the too-close confinement in the house that the other envies. As they enter adolescence, Nel and Sula share an experience which closely mirrors a sexual awakening, but which ends in the accidental death of a young boy, Chicken Litde. They keep their secret knowledge as the community mourns and buries him. As the unnatural heat of summer presses down on the Bottom, Sula, who had been hysterical at Chicken Litde's death, watches calmly as her mother, Hannah, burns to death in a freak acci- dent. Part one ends as Nel is married and Sula leaves for college. Ten years later, Sula returns "in a plague of robins." Her sexually liberated lifestyle and self-mastery alienate the town; her sexual tryst with Jude (Nel's husband) alienates Nel. Having worked her way through most of the men in the Bottom, Sula falls in love with and loses Ajax, the only male character whose self-mastery approaches her own. Sula's death the next year is welcomed in the Bottom, by all except Shadrack, the town eccentric.

The story of Nel and Sula is inscribed within the other, equally sorrowful stories of the Bottom. Each man in the Bottom has his own circle of sorrow. Shadrack, like his biblical namesake, survived fire - the fire of World War I, and just barely. He manages existence by concentrating his madness into compulsive patterns of order and behavior; he staves off the fear of death by annually inviting his neighbors to participate in National Suicide Day. likewise Eva's son, Plum, returns from serving in the war in Europe to a country where the only opportunities are for self-destruction. Wandering home addicted to morphine, he retreats to his womblike room only to be burned in his bed by his mother. Tar Baby, an ostracized white boy, is taken into the Peace home so that he can commit suicide slowly even as he lifts the spirits of Greater Saint Matthew's Church with his ethereal voice. The three Deweys, also taken by Eva from separate families, never seem to grow up at all, but rather to grow horizontally into each other, ultimately forming a kind of parodie Greek chorus. Wiley Wright works on the Lakes, living in the compulsively ordered house of his wife only three days in sixteen. Jude Green begins as an ambitious man, but in the face of denied opportunity settles for an emasculating job and the comfort of self- pity with an accommodating wife. Ajax (or A. Jacks), on the surface the most capable

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of men, dreams merely of flying, but never flies himself, unless Iiis abandonment of Sula counts. The men of the Bottom, barred from economic competition by a surrounding army of white and immigrant laborers, duped and disfranchised by the white power structure, laugh at the "nigger joke" that also puts them in a place where even agriculture is not feasible. Along the four blocks of Carpenter's Row, "[o]ld men and young ones draped themselves . . . [o]n sills, on stoops, on crates and broken chairs they sat tasting their teeth and waiting for something to distract them" {Sula 49). Economically, socially, and politically powerless, the men are grotesque embodiments

"In [this] place," the circular model of the land 'Vhere they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches

from their roots," Nel and Sula come of age.

of masculinity waiting to be distracted by the only group for whom they are not completely emasculated - the one set of equally grotesque characters more margin- alized than they - the women of the Bottom.

Everywhere in the Bottom are woman-centered families: The Wrights led by Helene; the Peaces by Eva and followed by Hannah; Teapot's mother; Ajax's mother; Chicken Litde's mother; and the unnamed others. Described in varying detail, each mother is a grotesque in her own right, producing a new generation of children locked into equally desperate cycles. Helene Wright, daughter of a prostitute and granddaughter of a zealous Catholic, flees the stigma of die Sundown House brothel for a life of personal repression with a husband who is effectively, but not always physically absent. Helene's flight from family history and her determination to change is the doomed circle of sorrow that shapes Nel's own. Eva Peace, abandoned with three children in 1895, sacrifices a leg for their economic security, and then builds an incongruous house; raises an incongruous family; collects equally incongruous male visitors; boards newlyweds and other outcasts; and rules over life and death in a world of her own choosing and under her personal control. Hannah, Eva's daughter and Sula's mother, treats sex with some one of Eva's visitors or boarders as just another daily diversion. The community forgives her easygoing sexuality, but it alienates her only daughter. A neglectful woman, Teapot's mother can nurture him only when Sula seems to antagonize her, and then only so long as the community sets Sula in that role. Ajax's mother, "as stubborn in her pursuits of the occult as the women of [the church] were in the search for redeeming grace[J" raises her sons in "absolute freedom . . . (known in some quarters as neglect)" (127 cf. 126). For the women of the Bottom, most days are evil days to which they "reacted . . . with an acceptance that bordered on welcome" (89). They know that:

[t]he purpose of evil was to survive it and they determined (without ever knowing they had made up their minds to do it) to survive floods, white people, tuberculosis, famine and ignorance. They knew anger well but not despair, and they didn't stone sinners for the same reason they didn't commit suicide - it was beneath them. (90)

"In [this] place," the circular model of the land "where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots," Nel and Sula come of age.

In light of Morrison's career as editor of many politically radical black texts and her outspoken position regarding the invisible blackness in American literature, one might expect to find on close reading of Sula that the metafictional structure of the novel would reveal, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has suggested, a subtext of African American literary criticism rooted in an African American folk tradition and the black vernacular language. In large part this is true, as Houston Baker, Jr. and Vashti Crutcher Lewis demonstrate. Baker sees in the work of Morrison's male predecessors, Wright and Ellison, a dialectical engagement that begins with displacement and con-

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finement and is compelled by economic forces, not the least of which is forced black labor, to black men's place in history (Baker 105-20). This place minimizes the role (and historical importance) of black women, replacing their generative function with a faith in technology and modernity. Baker reads Morrison's intention in Sula as an "an emerging vision of black women in the making," an oppositional voice grounded in the blues. He defines the blues as "an alternative expressive impulse in Afro-American life and culture that provides a notion of place . . . that looks not upward, but to the earth beneath black feet" (132). He offers an innovative reading of Morrison's approach to writing about intimate space. In strict counterpoint, Lewis contends that Sula cannot be understood via traditional modes of black or Western

criticism, but rather that "Morrison writes from an African point of view - an African aesthetic' " (Lewis 91); she reads Shadrack as a representative of African ancestors and Sula as a trickster and water spirit. When she flees to Shadrack's hut after the drowning of Chicken Little, Sula is symbolically united with Shadrack by his spoken word "always." Nel's scream in the final scene "acknowledges her love for Sula and no longer damns her, she too will be accepted by the gods of their ancestors" (95-96). 5 Lewis's folkloric reading of Sula resonates in many of its points with Baker's reading. While Sula is grounded in a traditionally African American speakerly text and the vernacular, and its characters nonetheless recall African archetypes, Morrison uses a Freudian-Lacanian symbol system that embeds her text firmly in the European psychoanalytic tradition. Sula is a litany of symptoms and symbols - castration images, phallic rituals, repression of desire, returns of the repressed, ego misdirection, and intrauterine fantasies so integral to the text that it is with some difficulty that they can be called sub- text.

Criticism of Sula has reflected this complex admixture of texts and subtexts. Barbara Christian has argued that the motifs of inversion and derangement are cen- tral to reading place and character in Sula: as the "nigger joke" signifies the commu- nity's relationship to the white world beyond its boundaries, so do people bound its interior space (75). Similarly, Barbara Lounsberry and Grace Hovet, in "Principles of Perception in Toni Morrison's Sula," read the novel as an exploration of the dilemma of preserving cultural identity while "mov[ing] forward, away from the limitations of a single cultural tradition, toward the multiple perspectives and opportunities of cultural pluralism" (Lounsberry and Hovet 126). For Lounsberry and Hovet, the major characters are examples of various failed attempts to order and contain reality using "past modes of perception." Helene Wright, for example, has protected her- self from the embarrassment of her prostitute mother by marrying and moving to the Bottom (from New Orleans); once established in social and religious respectability, the maintenance of that position requires rigid control of husband, daughter, and house, and high standards of "proper behavior" before the community. Jude Green, barred from the white economy, "needs" a second childhood, and marries Nel because he "needed some of his appetites filled [and] wanted someone to care about his hurt

(Sula 82). Sula herself offers "new perspectives on feminine reality. . . . [She] refuses to see women as only wives and mothers. . . . [and] views sex as something pleasant, frequent, experimental, . . . non-possessive, and otherwise unremarkable, and per- ceives relationships between women as non-competitive and supportive" (Lounsberry and Hovet 128). Lounsberry and Hovet conclude that although Sula suggests inter- esting new avenues for perception, Morrison asks many more questions than she answers, neither rejecting nor professing either principle, and leaves the reader in a state of ambivalence (129). Barbara Johnson compares Sula's signifying) on penis envy to Freud's observations in "The Uncanny" that the "homely" and familiar can become the most grotesquely "un-homely" and unfamiliar (6). She concludes that Morrison uses psychoanalytic imagery to make revolutionary political and aesthetic statements which are, by their historical nature, inseparably bound (11).

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Freudian theory marks Morrison's presentations of character. The men of the Bottom, for instance, signify varying degrees of castration complex. Shadrack, crazed and shattered, hangs on to a tenuous existence; Plum seeks only satiation and a return to the womb; Jude buries emasculation in self pity; and Ajax is content to watch voyeuristically as white men fly. All are without power, economically and socially castrated, just as their characters are symbolically castrated. The women of the Bottom are equally encumbered. Helene represses sexuality, diverting sex into control and control into order, obsessively cleaning her home and her public image. Hannah, who substitutes sex for love, is Helene's opposite, wanting only "some touching every day" ( Sula 44). Eva, every bit as deranged as Shadrack, is the person- ification of feminine sublimation. She is equally capable of sacrificing herself for her children and sacrificing her son for his manhood; of counseling young wives and taking children from their mothers; of indulging Tar Baby's self-burial and con- demning Plum's; of ignoring Hannah's easygoing, loose morality; and, of condemning Sula's willful, loose morality. Her every personal attitude is mated with its own inversion as Morrison creates in Eva possibly the single most internally conflicted character in postmodern fiction. Against this backdrop of this ego-misdirected, powerless, and conflicted community, Morrison tells the story of Nel and Sula. As she closes in on her central characters, the Lacanian symbolism becomes more overt.

The psychotherapy of Freud and Lacan resembles the very issues of its putative patients - it is all about the language of sex, which is to say, it is not about sex at all, but about language. The naturally profound differences between human beings cause conflict, and ego - the portion of the mind that deals with conflict - does so through misdirection. Consequendy, the human interface with reality and the external world creates distortion. According to Lacan, this same interface distorts both input and output. So we cannot know even our own deepest desires. What we can know is the imagery of our desires and perceptions described by the ego in language. In order for the psychotherapist to deal with these images, it is necessary to use language; but because many people use many words to convey many things, the "meaning" of language is never fixed. Lacan's "theory of language" is a structural arrangement of binary opposites, beginning with subject and signifier - the person speaking and the word spoken. To Lacan, what we say both constitutes and divides us. This model also describes "the unconscious [which is] structured like a language" (Lacan 139). This unconscious language has products that act as symptoms - errors of everyday life, jokes, and dreams. His theory of the mind includes three categories: the "sym- bolic," the "imaginary", and the "real." 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. Finally, then, Lacan's theory holds that our individual lives center on our own unspeakable realities. In Feminine Sexuality , he illustrates the theory with the Borromean knot, consisting of three rings; one ring each for the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real configured in such a way that breaking one knot frees all three (33):

Healing can occur when trauma is spoken about, even indirecdy: trauma is made more clearly "symbol" and less "real" as its symptoms are explored in language. The

boundaries, in other words, blur and col- - lapse.

The full import of Lacanian ideas in Sula appears as Nel visits Sula's deathbed.

I f 1 1 For these two, the memory of Chicken -Д ^ Little disappearing into the river is liter-

ally unspeakable; they cannot talk about it. J ( / i у ДА Since it cannot be spoken, it appears as II III y J I symptom: for Sula as promiscuity, for

Nel as first subservient wifehood and

then repressed sexuality and excessive

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mothering. The women talk, circling around, but not asking the question, not speaking the unspeakable to one another. Nel finally asks, "How come you did it Sula? [Why did you sleep with my husband?]." To Sula, however, Jude and Nel are not the point as Nel begins the exchange:

"And you didn't love me enough to leave him alone. To let him love me. You had to take him away."

"What you mean take him away? I didn't kill him, I just fucked him. If we were such good friends, how come you couldn't get over it?"

Saying, "I was good to you," Nel deliberately changes the subject to Sula:

"You laying there in that bed without a dime or a friend to your name having done all the dirt you did in this town and you still expect folks to love you?"

Her little ball of denial still intact, Nel has become defensive. But Sula envisions a time when Nel Wright will understand her, a time when in Lacan's terms the unspeakable will have been spoken:

"Oh, they'll love me all right. It will take time, but they'll love me." The sound of her voice was as soft and distant as the look in her eyes. "After all the old women have lain with the teen-agers; when all the young girls have slept with their old drunken uncles; after all the black men fuck all the white ones; when all the white women kiss all the black ones; when

the guards have raped all the jailbirds and after all the whores make love to their grannies; after all the faggots get their mothers' trim; when Lindbergh sleeps with Bessie Smith and Norma Shearer makes it with Stepin Fetchit; after all the dogs have fucked all the cats and every weathervane on every barn flies off the roof to mount the hogs . . . then there will be a litde love left over for me. And I know just what it will feel like."

She closed her eyes then and thought of the wind pressing her dress between her legs as she ran up the bank of the river to four leaf-locked trees and the digging of holes in the earth. (145-46)

For Sula the conversation has therapeutic value, in that the language has moved her memory of Chicken Litde from the real to the imaginary. She remembers:

They ran most of the way. Heading toward the wide part of the river where trees grouped themselves in families

darkening the earth below. They passed some boys swimming and clowning in the water, shrouding their words in laughter.

They ran in the sunlight, creating their own breeze, which pressed their dresses into their damp skin. Reaching a kind of square of four leaf-locked trees which promised cooling. (57)

As Nel leaves, embarrassed and irritated, Sula asks, "How you know?" Sula speaks what had been the unspeakable about her affairs and by extension, Chicken Little: "How do you know, Nel, that your calmly watching Chicken Litde disappear into the water was the right reaction? Maybe my hysterical reaction was the right reaction." And as she is dying, Sula remembers:

Always. Who said that? She tried hard to think. Who was it that had promised her a sleep of water always? The effort to recall was too great; it loosened a knot in her chest that turned her thoughts again to the pain. (149)

When she returns imaginatively to the river, Chicken Little, and Shadrack, Sula frees herself from the central trauma of her life. The Lacanian knot, the intertwining of the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real so integral to the self, is finally broken. As the knot, and life, falls away from her, Sula can reunite briefly with Nel, the other half of her ideal self.

Twenty-five years after Sula's death, Nel is shocked and embarrassed into her own confrontation with the unspeakable. Trying to justify herself after Eva's charge that "watching" Chicken Little disappear into the water was the same as throwing

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him in the river, she visits Sula's grave. In the final scene of the novel, she walks away from a symbolic grave of self:

"Sula?" she whispered, gazing at the tops of the trees. "Sula?" Leaves stirred; mud shifted; there was the smell of overripe green things. A soft ball of

fur broke and scattered like dandelion spores in the breeze. "All that time, all that time, I thought I was missing Jude." And the loss pressed down

on her chest and came up into her throat. "We was girls together," she said as though explaining something. "O Lord, Sula," she cried, "girl, girl, girlgirlgirl."

It was a fine cry - loud and long - but it had no bottom ahd it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow. (174)

For Nei, "We was girls together" is an explanation of her own loss and trauma; as her role in Chicken Little's death is moved from the real to the imaginary, Nel's repressed love for her childhood friend and "other self" moves painfully into consciousness. The unspeakable is finally spoken in the scream of grief that has been pent up for twenty-seven years.

Taken together, these scenes constitute a kind of narrative touchstone for Lacan's ideas about trauma and language. As he once explained, trying to heal trauma is an act of love and faith:

Were one dealing with beings who could not say anything, who could not pronounce what can be distinguished as truth and falsehood, then to believe in them would have no meaning. . . . Anyone who comes to us with a symptom, believes in it.

If he asks for our assistance or help, it is because he believes that the symptom is capable of saying something, and that it only needs deciphering. The same goes for a woman, except that it can happen that one believes her effectively to be saying something. That's when things get stopped up - to believe />/, one believes her. It's what's called love. (Lacan 169; original emphasis)

For Nel, to love Sula is to believe in Sula, as she believed in Nel. For Toni Morrison, to believe in Sula is to believe in language.

Morrison's interest in Lacanian ideas about the circularity of language affects the very structure of the novel. The Bottom is ringed by white newcomers, as they had

come to this valley . . . believing as they did that it was a promised land - green and shimmering with welcome. What they found was a strange accent, a pervasive fear of their religion and firm resistance to their attempts to find work. With one exception the older residents of Medallion scorned them. The one exception was the black community. Although some of the Negroes had been in Medallion before the Civil War (the town didn't even have a name then), if they had any hatred for these newcomers it didn't matter because it didn't show. As a matter of fact, baiting them was the only activity that the white Protestant residents concurred in. In part their place in this world was secured only when they echoed the old residents' attitude toward blacks. {Sula 52)

Rarely seen in the narrative, this boundary ring includes the "white folks [who tell the nigger joke] when the mill closes down and they're looking for a litde comfort somewhere," and "thin-armed white boys form the Virginia hills and the bull-necked Greeks and Italians" who compete for and win meaningful work on the road ( Sula 4, cf. 82); they form a geographical zone of exclusion which works, as Baker has observed, not so much to "place" the black community in the Bottom as to "displace" it from the white environment (Baker 104).

Concentric to this boundary are the black community pariahs, notably Shadrack and, after 1937, Sula. In the case of Shadrack, his madness (his otherness) excludes him from full participation in the community, while his blaclmess (his not-otherness) prevents his exclusion altogether out of the Bottom: "At first the people of the town were frightened; they knew Shadrack was crazy but that did not mean that he didn't have any sense or, even more important, that he had no power" ( Sula 14-15). Power is

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the operative identifier here, and is best understood in the Bottom's attitudes toward "nature" and "evil," which are seen as power controlled by an unknown other identity:

[A] full recognition of the legitimacy of forces other than good ones. They did not believe doctors could heal - for them, none ever had done so. They did not believe death was accidental - life might be, but death was deliberate. They did not believe Nature was ever askew - only inconvenient. Plague and drought were as "natural" as springtime. If milk could curdle, God knows robins could fall. The purpose of evil was to survive it. . . . (90)

Shadrack does not object to power as long as its effects can be contained; his identity is formed through a process of inclusion and control. He panics at displacement: the destruction of his comrade's body, his own uncontrollable hands and feet, the awful unexpectedness of death. He is in control when things are contained. Thus, "when they bound (him) into a straitjacket, he was both relieved and grateful, for his hands were at last hidden and confined to whatever size they had attained" (9); he finally "hit(s) on the notion that if one day a year were devoted to (death), every- body could get it out of the way and the rest of the year would be safe and free. In this manner he instituted National Suicide Day" (14). Inside Shadrack's cabin is compulsively ordered, while outside of it he is "drunk, loud, obscene, funny and outrageous" (61, cf. 15). Along with Eva and her crazy house, he is the most obvious example in the novel of how Morrison conflates place and character into a single container of identity. In doing so, she indicates that place will be identity's defining mechanism. Morrison's insistence on the circularity of the place-character relation- ship locates "the end in the beginning" that in turn "lies far ahead," as Ralph Ellison puts it in Invisible Man.

This understanding is a backward glance from the graveside of self, what she calls in Song of Solomon "the cocoon that was personality" (300). In other words, Morrison's language from the prologue onward implies that presence and absence in place are important; that time, or more precisely, history and place/identity over time, are important; and that gendered spaces within "that place" and "that time" are important. All are the intended carriers of meaning within the discourse of Sula - a novel which is itself deliberately linked in a dialogue with its African, African American, American, and European predecessors. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., postulates a "theory of criticism that is inscribed within the black vernacular tradition and that in turn

informs the shape of the Afro-American literary tradition" (xix). This tradition, he argues, is not simply parody or pastiche, forms in which a writer uses the words of a predecessor's text; rather, it also takes the form of what Mikhail Bakhtin calls the hidden polemic, speech that "shapes the author's speech while remaining outside its boundaries" (qtd. in Gates 111). The words and images of Sula are intimately tied in pastiche with the words and images of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man , as Michael Awkward has investigated this relationship in his book, Inspiriting Influences .6 The most obvious connection between Invisible Man and Sula is the trope of the circle: the novels begin at a narrative point near ( Invisible Man) or just beyond (Sula) their end points, and both use the circle to manipulate meaning and narrative action. For Invisible Man , the circles are a kind of downward spiral; each circle (virtually each chapter) is a lesson in the ways that the system operates to "keep this nigger running." The impetus for the action of Invisible Man , like Sula , is a "nigger joke;" appearing first as the grandfather's deathbed admonition to "[l]ive in the lion's mouth . . . over- come 'em with yeses, undermine 'em with grins, agree 'em to death and destruction" (Ellison 16). Although he does not know it, Ellison's protagonist chases the meaning of that joke as it evolves through the downward spiral of his education. In one of its forms, the joke is in Bledsoe's letters, which promise yet deny economic opportunity and racial advancement. When Ellison's protagonist finally gets the joke, he is con- fused and dazed:

My mind flew in circles, to Bledsoe, Emerson and back again. There was no sense to be made of it. It was a joke. Hell, it couldn't be a joke. Yes, it is a joke . . . Suddenly the bus

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jerked to a stop and I heard myself humming the same tune that the man ahead was whistling, and the words came back:

О well they picked poor Robin clean

О well they picked poor Robin clean

Well they tied poor Robin to a stump

Lawd, they picked all the feathers round

from Robin's rump

Well they picked poor Robin clean. (193)

Dr. Bledsoe and Mr. Emerson have promised the young man things they have no intention of delivering, for if they do, they will lose their own positions in the system that his grandfather hates. If a "nigger joke" is the inception of both novels and circles are the central trope for both novels, then the Robin from Ellison's crucial chapter nine multiplies and becomes a "plague of robins" to accompany Sula's return in "1937." One is tempted to ask how Shadrack avoided being sent to the Golden Day. Returning to his room in Men's House, Ellison's "hero" continues to equivocate,

Perhaps it was a test of my good will and faith - But that's a lie, I thought. It's a lie and you know it's a lie. I had seen the letter and it had practically ordered me killed. By slow degrees

"My dear Mr. Emerson," I said aloud. "The Robin bearing this letter is a former student. Please hope him to death, and keep him running. Your most humble and obedient servant, A. H. Bledsoe . . ."

Sure, that's the way it was, I thought, a short, concise verbal coup de grace , straight to the nape of the neck. And Emerson would write in reply? Sure: "Dear Bled, have met Robin and shaved tail. Signed, Emerson." (194; original ellipses)

Equivocation is his basic mode of operation - not for nothing is Mr. Emerson, the champion of "Self-Reliance," in Ellison's novel named "Mr. Emerson." The hero of "Self-Reliance" does not equivocate: "Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you" (Emerson 148). Mr. Emerson has no reason to doubt his place: he is white, educated, socially secure, financially stable, and named. Ellison's hero is asked in chapter 2, "You have studied Emerson, haven't you?" (41). In chapter nine, just before he reads Bledsoe's letter, he "reads" Emerson:

The room was quiet as a tomb - until suddenly there was a savage beating of wings and I looked toward the window to see an eruption of color, as though a gale had whipped up a bundle of brightly colored rags. It was an aviary of tropical birds set near one of the broad windows, through which, as the clapping of wings setded down, I could see two ships plying far out upon the greenish bay below. A large bird began a song, drawing my eyes to the throbbing of its bright blue, red and yellow throat. . . .

These folks are the Kings of the Earth! I thought, hearing the bird make an ugly noise. There was nothing like this at the college museum - or anywhere else that I had ever been. I recalled only a few cracked relics from slavery times: an iron pot, an ancient bell, a set of ankle-irons and links of chain, a primitive loom, a spinning wheel, a gourd for drinking, an ugly ebony African god that seemed to sneer (presented to the school by some traveling millionaire), a leather whip with copper brads, a branding iron with the double letter MM . . . Though I had seen them very seldom, they were vivid in my mind. (Ellison 181)

Caged male birds, ships, the artifacts of chattel ownership - his symbolic reading of slavery serves to place, or as Baker would say, ¿foplace, the protagonist relative to the textual Mr. Emerson: he is black, uneducated, socially insecure, financially unstable, and unnamed. Ellison's novel is a parody at length and in detail of Emerson's "Self- Reliance," and its method is to use Emerson's words in a reflected pastiche - a circle that describes and inscribes the inverse of "Self-Reliance." Emerson's "great man, . . . who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude," becomes for Ellison a grandfather who, after having put down his gun during Reconstruction, was a "spy in the enemy camp"; the "blind-man's bluff . . .

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game of conformity" becomes a deadly fight for baubles staged for white entertain- ment; the "foolish philanthropist" becomes a sly capitalist; that "[e]very true man is a cause, a country, and an age" becomes the tragedy of the Golden Day; a preacher of limited sight and no insight becomes a preacher with no sight of any kind (Emerson 150-51, 154; Ellison 16, 32, 39, 93, 133). In the aggregate, these white-to-black reflections place Ellison's unnamed man squarely in the path of the "boomerang of history" as he lives through various redactions of his grandfather's joke. Each redaction contains a lesson and moves him lower in his descent ("and under every deep, another deep opens," Emerson writes in "Circles") to confinement and invisi- bility. Finally underground, he "couldn't be still even in hibernation. Because, damn it, there's still the mind, the mind. It wouldn't let me rest. Gin, jazz and dreams were not enough. Books were not enough. My belated appreciation of the crude joke that had kept me running, was not enough. And my mind revolved again and again back to my grandfather" (Ellison 573-74). Coming to terms with his grandfather's dream, as Baker implies, reconciles Ellison to Emerson through 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 (Baker 105-20). James Albrecht essentially concurs with Baker, detailing at some length the agreement through opposition of Ellison's novel and Emerson's essay (60).

In a similar way, Sula signifies (as Gates would say) on and through Invisible Man. The "nigger joke" initiates a quest for Ellison's hero; for Morrison, it is the inception of the Bottom, a black community: as Baker says, she "looks down at the ground beneath black feet" (Baker 132). WTiat she sees there is encircled space. Within that place, she also sees encircled, gendered, intimate spaces moving through time. In "1937," when Sula returns to the Bottom to occupy one of those intimate spaces, she returns "in a plague of robins." That Sula "was dressed in . . . black crepe dress splashed with pink and yellow zinnias. . ." {Sula 90) recalls direcdy the caged birds in Mr. Emerson's office, "I looked toward the window to see an eruption of color, as though a gale had whipped up a bundle of brightly colored rags" (181). And the robins from Ellison's chapter nine are unmistakable. With these three elements - the "nigger joke," the circular narrative, and Ellison's poor robin - Morrison evokes both the narrative and meaning of Ellison's Invisible Man , declaring that Sula will take up the same ideas and rewrite them from a new perspective. That it is the black woman, Sula Peace, returning to the Bottom in a plague of robins, intimates that Morrison's new perspective is feminine.

Again, Baker helps us to read how Morrison rewrites Invisible Man in terms of this most visible of women: in Ellison's text, African American women seem hardly to exist at all; they are alienated "from the univocal male placements" as the male rise to consciousness displaces even her womb with the artificial, technological apparatus of industry (Baker 161). Baker, reading this male writerly reaction as evidence of the demoralization of black men resulting from historically institutionalized rape as the tool of terror, quotes another radical black woman, Angela Davis:

It would be a mistake to regard the institutionalized pattern of rape during slavery as an expression of white men's sexual urges, otherwise stifled by the specter of white womanhood's chastity. Rape was a weapon of domination, a weapon of repression, whose covert goal was to extinguish slave women's will to resist, and in the process, to demoralize their men. (qtd. in Baker 125)

Black women, Baker argues eloquendy, are relegated "to a historical void" even within the displaced and marginalized circle of black culture - black male writers, Wright and Ellison in particular, valorize "the machine as a sign of the possibilities of a new, male proletarian bonding across racial lines [necessitating] a violent repu- diation of the domestic black woman" (125). 7

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Sula's return to the Bottom amid a plague of Ellison's fallen robins directly con- fronts Invisible Man by "placing" a visible woman into the central community role - the social and sexual pariah against whom the community defines itself. As both center and periphery of these intersecting circles of sorrow, Sula at first flaunts her sexual emancipation, but finds in the end that this is one more redaction of the "nigger joke." As if taking upon herself the sexual transgression of the entire community, she finds herself in silence and alone:

There, in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning.

And here she wept

[t]ears for the deaths of the litdest things: the castaway shoes of children; broken stems of marsh grass battered and drowned by the sea; prom photographs of dead women she never knew; wedding rings in pawnshop windows; the tidy bodies of Cornish hens in a nest of rice. ( Sula 123)

Sula might reasonably have expected reward for such profound service. What she received may well be called the Bottom of Hell: Ajax, infertile ground indeed; the distant, never quite comprehending respect of Shadrack, the community prophet; and an all-but-forgotten grave.

If there is triumph in Morrison's narrative - or, if there is at least the hope of triumph here - its beginning is at the end of the novel. Nel's realization that it is the loss of Sula that she has held close, and her confession, "We was girls together" (174), might have something to say about the recovery of black woman from the void of history. Grief is, for Nel, the beginning of memory.

I would suggest that hope lies in Morrison's hidden polemic: by appropriating Invisible Man as her palimpsest, Morrison implies that her novel will have something to say about Ellison's parodie subject, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Her repeated emphasis on circles acts as a direct link to Emerson's essay, "Circles." Written in 1839, "Circles" appears in Emerson's first collection of essays in 1841; its central concern is the perception of time through language. Using the trope of circles within circles to describe a universe in flux, Emerson emphasizes time and progress, "the flying Perfect, around which the hands of man never meet," and the individual's place in this expanding universe (Emerson 168). Glancing backward ("Greek sculpture is all melted away . . . the letters last longer, but are already passing under the same sen- tence and tumbling into the inevitable"), Emerson settles on the future, and on progress (169). "The only sin is limitation," he declares; thus, to remain static is to lose one's place in time; to avoid this, we use language to "afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we may move it" (171, cf. 173). History, the past from which we as individuals and cultures move, is worthless: "Why should we import rags and relics into the new hour? Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only disease" (176; emphasis added). As we have seen in "Self-Reliance," so in "Circles" does Emerson take as axiomatic the idea of self-determination; his speaker in "Circles" is one who is self-determined, who has power. In Freudian-Lacanian terms, such power is represented by the phallus, the Sign of the Father: it is the discursive marker of (white) male power and patriarchal order. The women of the Bottom and especially those of Greater Saint Matthew's Church, know about power, they know especially about power in unknown or unapproachable hands: "And when they thought of all that life and death locked into that litde closed coffin they danced and screamed, not to protest God's will but to acknowledge it and confirm once more their conviction that the only way to avoid the Hand of God is to get in it" {Sula 66).

When one wields such power as Emerson assumes, he can afford to devalue history; history is no more than the record of where he has been, and where he now chooses to leave in order to move forward into a bright future of increasing

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perfection. Not so Ellison's hero, whose place is in the path of the "boomerang of history"; and not so the women of the Bottom, whose very existence is erased as their bodies are lowered into the ground. Nel's backward glance from Sula's grave seems to say that we cannot afford to devalue history: that it is not "from history/' but through time and place that communities grow and individuals live. In this sense, the scene serves as a narrative touchstone to the cultural and intellectual moment of

the novel's appearance. The last quarter of the twentieth century witnessed a growing interest, and an increasingly impressive production of works in black women's history, works which serve to resurrect the history of black women from the void of history.8 Contemporary historians have increasingly looked to alternative sources of documentation-diaries, church and court records, business records, surviving plantation records, family papers - to resurrect and reconstruct lives which might otherwise have been lost, re-visioning thereby the lives lived in American black communities over the last four centuries.9

If its literary polemic is nonetheless hidden, Morrison's message is clear and strident: "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 prologue of Sula occurs in time at some point after "1965," a point when the Bottom has become "the rags and relics" that Emerson would have us discard as unnecessary and unimportant. In this sense, the end is in the beginning, and all of Sula is a backward glance from the graveside of the Bottom - a glance which catches sight of a black woman in a flowered dress, her black feet dancing in the saffron dust. The prologue's glance serves to save from forgetfulness all that occurs, and all those who occur, in the Bottom during the years of its exis- tence. The very structure of the novel argues that identity and place over time - black women in "this" place and for "this" time - carry the meaning for the novel and the identity of the community.

The significance, then, of Morrison's inscription of Sula's circles onto Emerson's "Circles" is to mark the reclamation of black women's place in black culture and American history. In an especially poignant, though no doubt unintentional way, the final scene also serves as a touchstone to another incident in recent cultural history. In August 1973, Alice Walker traveled to Eatonville, Florida to find the unmarked grave of Zora Neale Hurston. As Walker remembers the feeling:

There are times - and finding Zora Hurston's grave was one of them - when normal responses of grief, horror, and so on do not make sense because they bear no real relation to the depth of the emotion one feels. It was impossible for me to cry when I saw the field full of weeds where Zora is. Partly this is because I have come to know Zora through her books and she was not a teary sort of person herself; put partly, too, it is because there is a point at which even grief feels absurd. And at this point, laughter gushes up to retrieve sanity.

It is only later, when the pain is not so direct a threat to one's own existence that what was learned in that moment of comical lunacy is understood. Such moments rob us of both youth and vanity. But perhaps they are also times when greater disciplines are born. (Walker 115-16)

Morrison rejects the idea that identity is individual, arguing instead that identity is created by and within community; even at its deepest and most intimate levels, identity rises not from the separation, but from the intersection, of circles of indi- viduality and unspeakable essentialist truth. Those intersections create and maintain identity, even when they cause pain and sorrow. This is life and it is not to be pushed away and forgotten.

These are Morrison's truths, and their approach is language. It is not a direct approach. For Morrison, it is one that requires the evocation of models: Western and African, white and black, male and female, literary and experimental. And though it does not take a direct path, neither does Sula meander. Rather, Sula circles. Describing, circumscribing, inscribing, intersecting its circles, Sula circles its meaning, and in the doing of it, means its circles: "It's what's called love."

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Notes

128

1. For treatments of circles as a motif throughout Morrison's work, see, for example, Carmen Subryan, "Circles: Mother and Daughter Relationships in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon" SAGE 5.1 (Summer 1988): 34-36; Philip Page, "Circularity in Toni Morrison's Beloved ," African American Review 26. 1 (Spring 1992): 31-39; Phillip Novak, " 'Circles and Circles of Sorrow': In the Wake of Morrison's Sula," PMLA 114.2 (March 1999): 184-93; Gurleen Grewal, Circles of Sorrow, Lines of Struggle: The Novels of Toni Morrison (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2000).

2. Nor, I hasten to add, does the current effort propose a definitive reading of the novel. This novel and indeed all literature "means" what writer and reader combine to create; what Morrison says about writers and writing is equally true of readers and reading: "the subject of the dream is the dreamer" (Playing 17).

3. "Oh, duh!" as one of my early readers observed, "even the name of the town is Medallion. Of course [Sula is] about circles."

4. The prevailing academic view - that centuries of slavery had sapped African American culture of African content, prevented development of a cohesive black culture, and destroyed the black family, which further deteriorated during the Great Migration - was amply illustrated in the work of the Chicago School of sociology in the 1920s and '30s (Robert Park, Robert Redfield, and Louis Wirth, for example), reflected in Richard Wright's 12 Million Black Voices , and amplified by historians of slavery. This view was the received wisdom of the Moynihan Report, The Negro Family in America by 1965. Historians like Laurence Glaseo and Herbert Guttman began to question the thesis by the late 1960s, but it was not until 1976 that Guttman's seminal The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 appeared.

5. Recent Africanist readings take up this lead. Jennings, for example, seeks to explicate character and structure in Morrison's work as "identifiable West and Central African traditional religious subscriptions by which her novels may most effectively be read" (5). Okonkwo reads Sula as the "[im]mortal heroine" through the Oganje-Abiku tradition and posits interesting links to the work of Achebe and Soyinka (651). Okonkwo's A Spirit of Dialogue: Incarnations of Ogbanje, the Bom-to-Die, in African American Literature

(Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2008) promises to expand our understanding of the intertextuality of Africanist traditions in African American literature. Both suggest alternative, perhaps parallel, origins to the circularity observable in Morrison's fictive universe.

6. Awkward's Inspiring Influences provides an excellent survey of the tradition of revision and rewriting of themes in black women's literature.

7. Evidence for claims by both Davis and Baker can be read clearly enough: Wright said of black women that they "fared easier than we men during the early days of freedom; on the whole their relationship to the world was more stable than ours. Their authority was supreme in most of our families inasmuch as many of them worked in the 'Big Houses' of the Lords of the Land and had learned manners, had been taught to cook, sew, and nurse. During slave days they did not always belong to us, for the Lords of the Land often took them for their pleasure. When a gang of us was sold from one plantation to another, our wives would sometimes be kept by the Lords of the Land and we men would have to mate with whatever slave girl we chanced upon. Because of their enforced intimacy with the Lords of the Land, many of our women, after they were too old to work, were allowed to remain in the slave cabins to tend generations of black children. They enjoyed a status denied us men, being called 'Mammy'; and through the years they became symbols of motherhood, retaining in their withered bodies the burden of our folk wisdom, reigning as arbiters in our domestic affairs until we men were freed and had moved to cities where cash-paying jobs entitled us to become the heads of our own families" (Wright 36-37). The story of Eva Peace might be read as Morrison's example of how black women "fared easier" in 1896.

8. One immediately recalls that the central act in Beloved - Sethe' s murder of her daughter rather than give the child up to slave hunters - resurrects the experience of Margaret Garner in 1856. However, as Morrison has always maintained, Beloved is neither history nor historical fiction - rather, she was inspired by a single traumatic moment not to historicize Garner, but to write this "circle of sorrow" that interrogates fictively the ways that memory, trauma, and guilt "play in the darkness" of American racial history.

9. The list begins sparsely, but grows rapidly after the formation of the Association of Black Women Historians in 1977. Any footnote listing is necessarily short and inadequate; nevertheless, a small sampling would include Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (New York: Norton, 1976); Sharon Hartley and Roselyn Terborg-Penn, The Afro- American Woman: Struggles and Images (Baltimore: Black Classic, 1978); Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women's Campaign against Lynching (New York: Columbia UP, 1979); Evelyn Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993); Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1996); Tera W. Hunter, To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997); and Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2004).

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Baker, Houston A., Jr. Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing. Chicago: U of

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and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. Lewis, Vashti Crutcher. "African Tradition in Toni Morrison's Sula ." Phylon 48.1 (1987): 91-97. Lounsberry, Barbara, and Grace Ann Hovet. "Principles of Perception in Toni Morrison's Sula ." Black

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Okonkwo, Christopher N. "A Critical Divination: Reading Sula as Ogbanje-Abiku." African American Review 38.4 (Winter 2004): 651-68.

Smith, Valerie. " 'Circling the Subject:' History and Narrative in Beloved ." Gates and Appiah 342-55. Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose. New York: Harcourt-Brace, 1983. Wright, Richard. 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States. New York: Viking,

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