Revolutionary Suicide in Toni Morrison's Fiction - Critical Essay

African American Review, Fall, 2000 by Katy Ryan

individual phenomenon as well as a psychological, collective entity.

Having seen black people tortured and brutalized, Newton possesses a certainty about death that is neither abstract nor vague. He cites this as a distinguishing feature between people of color and white allies: "In this we are different from white radicals. They are not faced with genocide" (4)--or with the political demand to consider suicide. To face death, to be faced with genocide --Newton's writing relies on the rhetorical mobilization of face as a verb, as an action beyond "seeing." To face something (the truth, the facts) implies a reluctant if comprehensive acceptance. For Newton, to face reality is also to dedicate oneself to changing it: "Although I risk the likelihood of death, there is at least the possibility, if not the probability, of changing intolerable conditions" (3). Newton seizes on the word suicide, radically investing it with political power and connecting it to movements throughout the "third world."

A former prisoner of war under the Nazi regime, Emmanuel Levinas also theorized about the ethical imperative to face history and one another, though he came to a different conclusion than did Newton about the efficacy of violent resistance. His philosophical writings, particularly Totality and Infinity (1969), patiently dismantle certain totalitarian and arrogant foundations of Western thought. He dedicated Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974) "to the memory of those who were closest among the six million assassinated by the National Socialists, and of the millions on millions of all confessions and all nations, victims of the same hatred of the other man, the same antisemitism." Levinas understood that to resist violent regimes is to put one's life at risk. And to understand violence, we must understand the face: "Violence can only aim at a face" (Totality 140). Levinas attaches profound primacy to the face; as a physical revelation, it establishes the context and terms for his reconsideration of d esire, the trace, the other. "To expose myself to the vulnerability of the face is to put my ontological right to existence into question"; "my duty to respond to the other suspends my natural right to self-survival" ("Dialogue" 24). Newton's revolutionary discourse shares with Levinas this field of inquiry--what responsibilities (what loves) override the individual? What does it mean to belong to a community? What responsibilities arise from "facing" the other, the self, and the world? Both Newton and Levinas help to name the ethical crisis, the crash of alterity, registered by suicide in three of Morrison's novels, Beloved, Sula, and Song of Solomon.

Beloved: "it is hard to make yourself die forever"

Newton distinguishes revolutionary suicide, which is fueled by hope, from reactionary suicide, which is fueled by despair:

By hoping and desiring, the revolutionary suicide chooses life; he is, in the words of Nietzsche, "an arrow of longing for another shore." Both suicides despise tyranny, but the revolutionary suicide is both a great despiser and a great adorer who longs for another shore. (371)