Following her act: sequence and desire in Gayl Jones's The Healing

As with what Slavoj Zizek has called "the act," Jones's novelized healing "restructures the very symbolic coordinates of the agent's situation: it is an intervention in the course of which the agent's identity itself is radically changed" (85). Todd McGowan elaborates on Zizek's point in his recent reading of Charles W. Chesnutt's novel The Marrow of Tradition (1901), noting that the act is successful in establishing true agency because it is traumatic and literally "non-sensical" within the dominant ideology. The act thus "indicates a break in ideology's chain of meaning, a point that ideology cannot account for, and thus it throws its entire symbolic universe into question, making evident the gap in ideology that is typically smoothed over" (McGowan 107). This rupture evolves even (or especially) when the chain of meaning is constructed as a sequential chain. This paradigm of healing that Harlan embodies resonates with the hope for a better future that black womanist theologian Stephanie Y. Mitchem counts among the attributes of African American spirituality. When "[l]ived in the body, community, and world, African American women's faith often extends to hope for the healing of all people as a natural corollary of envisioning a new, more perfect world," Mitchem avers (281). When the most immediately convincing arguments about US society lead back to the same racist outcomes, Jones joins these other writers to suggest that there is indeed a way to thwart durable sequences of the same.

In the epilogue to Jones's novel, Harlan's journey from human to healer is on the verge of another change: "She [had] been celibate ever since the healing power came" (283), but the final events reawaken her sexual desire--in a pleasurable recognition, not a fraught misrecognition. When Harlan arrives at another healing, "he stands. They told me he would be Nicholas. Surely, they hadn't asked him his name. They'd heard about the man who was my witness, heard his name was Nicholas, and simply assumed this was him.... But the man standing here is the last man in the world I expected to find. Or maybe the first man I'd hoped for" (283). In this final moment, Jones shows that Harlan can still be surprised. Whereas before, her relationships with men had been full of rivalry and distrust--the symptoms of following--this man is a potential source of hope. The Healing is synonymous with Harlan's act, productively thwarting desires for novelistic realism, for linear chronology or rigid sequence, for African American acquiescence to white supremacy, and especially any desire for black female silence in the face of oppression. The surprise that remains when these expectations fail is a space opened for the act.