The named and the nameless: Morrison's 124 and Naylor's "the other place" as semiotic chorae

African American Review, Winter, 2004 by Elizabeth T. Hayes

The other place and 124 function as what Julia Kristeva calls in Revolution in Poetic Language the "semiotic chora," a pre-verbal, pre-Oedipal space of the mother, a discourse space that Plato, from whom Kristeva took the term chora, designates as an indeterminate, "unnameable" maternal receptacle (qtd. in Rivkin and Ryan 453-54; 46061, n5). Kristeva describes the chora in "Le Sujet en Proces" as "a womb or a nurse in which elements are without identity [i.e. nameless] and without reason" (qtd. in Oliver 46). As semiotic chorae inscribing African American women, 124 and the other place support Chandler's conclusion that houses in American fiction symbolize the relationships of characters to one another, to themselves, and to the world.

Despite the pivotal heterosexual romantic relationships in Beloved and Mama Day, the novels are essentially "mother/daughter plot[s]" (to borrow Marianne Hirsch's phrase) enacted in and through the houses. It is remarkable how many women in these two texts are heavily invested in maternality and how frequent are the references to physical maternal functions. All of the major female characters--Sethe, Denver, Beloved, Baby Suggs, Mama Day, Cocoa, Sapphira, Bernice, and Abigail--and most of the minor female characters, including Ella, Amy Denver, Ophelia (Mama Day's mother), Grace (Cocoa's mother), Reema, and Carmen Rae, are at some time during the course of the narrative either pregnant; attempting to become pregnant; involved in labor and delivery, either as mother, midwife, or infant; breastfeeding, either as mother or infant; or contemplating or discussing breastfeeding. A few of the women are involved in all of these maternal activities. For the women in these texts, subjectivity is closely tied to their relationship to the maternal body, whether that body is their own or another's.

Kristeva's observation (derived from the psychological theories of Melanie Klein) that "pre-Oedipal processes are organized through projection onto the mother's body" (qtd. in Rivkin & Ryan 462, n14) also applies in these novels to the male characters, for whom the relationship to the maternal body is a locus of particular concern. For example, George, abandoned as an infant by his mother, unconsciously displaces his pain, anger, and fear of abandonment onto his wife Cocoa by making passive-aggressive cracks about her small breasts every time someone asks him even the most innocuous question about his mother. Only once is George's unconscious defensive behavior less aggressive: in this instance, instead of lashing out at Cocoa, the normally outwardly unemotional George cries on Cocoa's breast after asking her to breastfeed the babies they hope to have. George's deeply-conflicted relationship to the feminine (or, as Klein would say, to the breast) leads him to enter the space(s) of the Mother--the other place and, later, the henhouse--with extreme reluctance, and with a rigidly rationalist mind closed to the nonrationalist "madness" (286) of the mother responsible for his presence in those spaces, Mama Day, whom he angrily disparages as a "crazy old woman" (296).