Reader, text, and subjectivity: Toni Morrison's 'Beloved' as Lacan's gaze qua object

Style, Fall, 1996 by Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber

Bhabha asserts that the identity of the Other emerges through the "articulation of cultural difference" or the iteration of the "excess of" difference (Location 1-2). This articulation enables the object to become subject. At the same time, this creation of identity of difference generates a sense of the

unhomeliness - that is[,] the condition of . . . cross-cultural initiations. . . . The recesses of the domestic space become sites for history's most intricate invasions. In that displacement, the borders between home and world become confused; and uncannily, the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting. (Bhabha, Location 9)

Morrison's text creates this unhomeliness for the reader in the points where the real emerges, producing for the reader a sense of unease in the shift from object to subject when the traditional object - Other - becomes subject. Points of fissure in the narrative, the places where pieces of the real emerge, signify the gaze of the Other and point to the nullity of the reader's own subjectivity. These locations in the text exemplify Lacan's statement that "[t]he message, our message, in all cases comes from the Other[,] . . . 'from the place of the Other'" ("Of Structure" 186). These varying points in the text, materialized through shifts in perspective, create a bombardment - the montage - of pieces of the real. And it is in these fissures that the characters perceive their own object positions so as to claim their subjectivity. Morrison consciously opens Beloved in medias res so that the

reader is snatched, yanked, thrown into an environment completely foreign . . . . Snatched just as the slaves were from one place to another, from any place to another, without preparation and without defense. . . . One of its purposes is to keep the reader preoccupied with the nature of the incredible spirit world while being supplied a controlled diet of the incredible political world.

(Morrison, "Unspeakable" 32)

Her montage technique compounds this effect by revealing the "unspeakable" through the gaze of the Other.

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Beloved tells the story of Sethe's cruel treatment as a slave, her courageous escape to freedom, her murder of her infant daughter that she commits in order to save her daughter from an unlivable life with her brutal owners, and the return of her daughter's troubled spirit. Morrison's text discloses a variety of perspectives - race, gender, class, historical experience - that reinscribe culture through the Lacanian gap between "the (prior) subject of the utterance" and "the (present) subject of the enunciation" (Snead 123).(5) These multiple constituencies surface in what Andrew Levy calls Morrison's "community of narrative voices" (115). Sethe and the other characters - Paul D (an escaped slave), Denver (Sethe's daughter), and Beloved (Sethe's dead daughter) - all reveal a piece of the real in those moments where they gain subjectivity through their acute perception of their object status. The text uncovers events in a circular way, in bits and pieces, from different characters, building to the work's final interchange of voices when Sethe, Beloved, and Denver shut out the rest of the world and become "free at last to be what they liked, see whatever they saw and say whatever was on their minds . . . unspeakable thoughts, unspoken" (199). The effect of the narrative is rather like what Paul D feels when he listens to Sethe tell of her ordeal: "It made him dizzy. At first he thought it was her spinning. Circling him the way she was circling the subject. . . . No, it's the sound of her voice; it's too near . . .[,] like having a child whisper into your ear so close you could feel its lips form the words you couldn't make out because they were too close" (161). The reader experiences this unsettling sense of the text's being too close, that is, its view of an unconscious reality that threatens subject status.