Revolutionary Suicide in Toni Morrison's Fiction - Critical Essay

African American Review, Fall, 2000 by Katy Ryan

I want to shift Horvitz's emphasis: It is not the death of a mother but the loss of a face that gives this scene its emotional complexity. While the mother-daughter relationship can be powerful, fraught, killing, and loving (most certainly in Morrison's work), it does not exhaust human capacity for connection. The woman who jumps overboard may be a sister, aunt, twin, grandmother, friend--or mother; the loss of any of these faces would devastate a girl crammed in a slaveship, loving a dead man's teeth: "We are all," as she says, "trying to leave our bodies behind" (210). The anonymity of the woman who jumps and her unclear, yet absolute, relationship to the speaker unhinges the act of suicide from the plot; it cannot be clearly placed or neatly tied to other characters. From this alterity emerges "a hot thing"--an object of longing with whom the self wants to "join." This longing is immediately connected to a face: "I want her face a hot thing" (211).

A face, Levinas writes, is the "phenomenon which is the apparition of the other" and that which comes from "beyond" ("Trace" 351,354): "A face enters our world from an absolutely alien sphere--that is, precisely out of an absoluteness, which in fact is the name for fundamental strangeness" ("Trace" 352). Beloved sees the face of the other in an "absolutely alien sphere"--in a suicidal moment on a ship that seems a grave. The suicide of the unknown woman begins the intentional return of Beloved, who waits for someone to "say me my name" on the bridge (212):

her face comes through the water a hot thing...I have to have my face I go in... I am looking for the join I am loving my face so much my dark face is close to me I want to join...I am gone now I am her face my own face has left me I see me swim away a hot thing (213)

Beloved watches herself swim away from a perspective, a language, detached from her body. Intersubjective identity and the desire for symbiosis are figured through a radical substitution of body parts--"now I am her face my face has left me." The "underwater face" that Beloved desires is, like Levinas's "abstract face," not a gentle thing; it is a demanding "wretchedness" that, in its nudity, supplicates and will not be ignored:

The approach of the face is the most basic mode of responsibility.... [The face] is the other before death, looking through and exposing death. Secondly, the face is the other who asks me not to let him die alone, as if to do so were to become an accomplice in his death. ("Dialogue" 23-24)

Levinas identifies the penultimacy of the face, "the other before death," as the mode and proof of responsibility.

Beloved and Sethe are bound to faces that condemn as much as comfort, faces that make an appeal at the moment of death. Beloved wants to follow the woman who has killed herself, and Sethe allows herself to be consumed by Beloved, unwilling to be an accomplice (again) in her death. Both characters have faced death, personally and through another, and their refusal to forget constitutes revolutionary suicide. They risk safety and life, knowing the alternative means an intolerable existence. Beloved equates Sethe wholly with the face--"Sethe is the face" (my emphasis), not Sethe has the face. In this revision of Lacanian desire, the face, not the gaze per se, achieves primary significatory value and initiates reciprocal fictions, fictions that have material impacts on psyches and bodies. Insatiably hungry, Beloved demands sweets and goods from the others, but "when Sethe ran out of things to give her, Beloved invented desire" (240). She is not imposed upon by desire; Beloved creates it. Levinas wonders about th is very process--"Is the desire for another an appetite or a generosity?" ("Trace" 351). Desire does not proceed from a lack but "is born in a being that lacks nothing, or, more exactly, it comes to birth on the other side of all that can be lacking him or can satisfy him" ("Trace" 350).