I am bored with the topic of Atlantic slavery. I have come to be bored because so many boring people have talked about it. So many artists and writers and thinkers, mediocre and genius, have used it because it is a big, easy target. They appropriate it, adding no new insight or profound understanding, instead degrading it with their nothingness. They take the stink of the slave hold and make it a pungent cliché, take the blood-soaked chains of bondage and pervert them into Afrocentric bling. . . . What’s even more infuriating is that, despite this stupidity, this repetitious sophistry, the topic of chattel slavery is still unavoidable for its American descendants. It is the great story, the big one, the connector that gives the reason for our nation’s prosperity and for our very existence within it. . . . Turns out though that my thorough and exhaustive scholarship into the slave narratives of the African Diaspora in no way prepared me to actually become a fucking slave.
—Mat Johnson, Pym, 2011
Midway through Mat Johnson’s exhilarating, novelistic response to Edgar Allan Poe’s faux travelogue, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Johnson’s protagonist, a professor of African American literature, pauses to remark upon his fatigue with black studies’ prolific discourse on the slave past. This passage is remarkable not only because its irreverence scandalizes historical trauma but, moreover, because it assumes a degree of familiarity with the protagonist’s complaint: The reader must comprehend slavery’s ubiquity in black writing in order to be in on the joke. Johnson, of course, is ironizing his own position as an author grappling with slavery and the African American past within a saturated, twenty-first-century literary marketplace. Our hero, Professor Chris Jaynes, bespeaks a desire to be released from the past and what he perceives to be its hackneyed, inadequate re-vivifications. Yet this desire is belied by his enduring attachment to the history of slavery, where he envisions “the great story, the big one” whose causal reverberations produce the content and meaning of the American present. Chris, as a literary historian and expert on the genre of the slave narrative, is consumed with the “fossil record . . . of modern racial thought,” and his research is directed by his belief that combating racism in the present requires an excavation of the literary past.1
Though he is an African Americanist by training, Chris’s recent teaching and research focus singularly on “the intellectual source of racial whiteness”2 that he argues—after Toni Morrison in Playing in the Dark—is concentrated in Poe’s writing.3 Early in the novel, Chris is denied tenure, but he forestalls despair when he happens upon the papers of Dirk Peters, the thought-to-be fictional, “half-breed Indian” companion of Poe’s titular Arthur Gordon Pym.4 Chris discovers that, in fact, Peters was African American and real. This discovery initiates the protagonist’s post-academic life as an independent researcher-cum-adventurer retracing the routes of Pym and Peters. Undertaken as Chris’s destiny and desire, the voyage to Antarctica and its environs that occupies the remainder of the text conflates the geographically exotic expedition with the professor’s conquest of the very literary and cultural archetypes that purportedly bore him: the fantasy of a “great undiscovered African Diasporan homeland . . . uncorrupted by Whiteness”;5 the fantasy of historical revision, redemption, or repair; the terrorizing idea of contemporary black subjects enslaved to monstrous forces of whiteness; and the specifically literary will to speak back to an inherited corpus of racist writing.
Thus Pym reveals the potent endurance of its hero’s historical desire in spite of a competing will to be done with the past. Yet it declines to endorse that inextinguishable desire as useful or inherently valuable. When Chris is forcibly made the property of a band of brutish “snow honk[ies],” his epiphany is this: “Turns out . . . that my thorough and exhaustive scholarship into the slave narratives of the African Diaspora in no way prepared me to actually become a fucking slave.”6
Put differently, Chris’s absurdist descent into slavery—which begins with a literary encounter with Peters’s “Negro servant’s memoir”—leads him to detect his previous hermeneutical error. He had been reading with the expectation of liberation or redemption, hoping to cure racism, or to “redeem” Peters by returning his skeleton (which Chris acquires) to a fantastical “island of blackness,” or to rediscover himself in the context of a blackness untouched by “the Diasporan dialogue.” “There was a group of our people,” Chris deduces through his reading of Peters’s papers, “who did achieve victory over slavery in all its forms, escaping completely from the progression of Westernization and colonization to form a society outside of time and history.”7 But each of these fantasies of meaning’s confirmation remains beyond the frame of the novel, inaccessible to its questing, internal reader. Instead of deliverance, Pym gives us proliferating, successive scenes of Chris’s imperilment, each the effect of mis-interpretation on his part. Might this crisis in interpretation, which manifests as reading that gets us stuck (in various enemies’ traps), circle back to the protagonist’s complaint of boredom and impasse in the contemporary discourse on slavery? And, if this is so—if certain habits of reading black historical fiction have calcified into restrictive habit—then how might we re-fresh and re-imagine our readerly task?
For many critics, Beloved is the exemplar of black fiction’s historical turn: It is the book that taught us how to read as we read now. Its lesson is construed variously, as the necessary or dangerous command, or the inscription of the impossible wish, that literary encounters with the slave past will compel a reparative catharsis for the contemporary reader. More fundamentally, Beloved is regarded as the unparalleled cultural text that confirms the register of trauma and the topic of slavery as the foremost concerns of black literary study. Taking Pym as cue and cautionary tale, I want to ask, What if we displace Beloved as the central or singular prism through which to understand the agency of post–Civil Rights African American literature and the demands of historical desire? How, and with what effects, might we re-imagine the contours of our critical enterprise—say, through an iconoclastic alternative to Morrisonian poetics like Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale (1982) or through Morrison’s own rejoinder to Beloved in the form of her 1997 novel, Paradise?
In lieu of a conclusion, the present chapter performs an open-ended experiment in reading African American literature differently. Rather than argue that we must be done with the past or that we must vigilantly preserve its place in contemporary consciousness, I seek out alternative literary-critical genealogies to de-familiarize the investments and allegiances that dominate our field today. My intention is not to prescribe a new methodological hegemony (though, like any critic, I carry my biases) but to unsettle received ideas about what black literary studies should want and do. If, thus far, my book has made its claims in the negative—how not to read, what we miss when we read through certain habits of thought—my intention, now, is to re-imagine such critique in terms of the positive.
First printed by a university press where Johnson claims to have found “the only editor in America . . . able to understand and willing to publish [it],”8 Oxherding Tale is an unusual take on the contemporary narrative of slavery. Its wry humor, literary historical commentary, and epic adventure position it as a noteworthy precursor to Pym, but unlike Beloved, which so often serves as the basis for generalizing pronouncements about black historical fiction, Johnson’s novel is neither representative of a major literary trend, nor is it especially remarkable for its commercial or pedagogical popularity. In fact, Johnson has somewhat fastidiously fashioned himself as the anti-Morrison of contemporary black letters: irreverent, anti-identitarian, and complexly misogynistic, he dismisses Beloved as “an interesting middle-brow book” that falls short of measurable “intellectual achievement.”9 Emplotting a “literary vision of slavery as ludic as Toni Morrison’s is tragic,” Oxherding Tale sits in irreducible tension with the literary tradition of which it is part.10 It is decidedly atypical in style, tone, and its embedded philosophy of race; it is densely meta-fictional and deliberately, unapologetically comedic; and its playful use of a traumatic strain of racial history (i.e., slavery and fugitive escape) is by all accounts unusual and, by many accounts, offensive.11 But despite its distinctive, comedic façade, Oxherding Tale also unfolds a deeply serious and self-consciously ambivalent meditation on history, literature, identity, and desire—those thematic concerns at the generic heart of the contemporary narrative of slavery. Precisely because of its status as a brother-outsider text to the genre, I turn to this novel to illuminate the normative boundaries of generic and hermeneutical practice. How do we read now—through what desires, attachments, and disavowals—and how might we read otherwise?
Originally drafted under the working title “The Last Liberation,” Oxherding Tale follows and flouts the formal conventions of the antebellum slave narrative—a genre the text internally describes as those “authentic narratives written by bondsmen who decided one afternoon to haul hips for the Mason Dixon line.”12 The novel’s narrative action spans the twenty-three-year period between 1838 and 1861, during which time its mixed-race protagonist, Andrew Hawkins, is born a slave, suffers through various ordeals of bondage, becomes a fugitive—aided by literacy and book learning, as well as his ability to pass for white—and finally escapes the pursuit of a villainous slave catcher. But bursting from the seams of this predictable narrative progression is a far more unusual plot, full of hijinks, philosophizing detours, and intricate and outrageous twists.
The novel begins in 1838, nine months before Andrew Hawkins’s birth, when Jonathan Polkinghorne, owner of the Cripplegate Plantation, orchestrates an absurd and calamitous prank. “Literally inebriated with power,”13 Jonathan demands to trade places for the night with his favorite slave, George Hawkins. Andrew is the product of a mutually non-consensual sex act between George and Jonathan’s wife, Anna. His conception signals the downfall of each of his parents, for the following day, George is remanded to the fields and Anna descends into a long period of shame and isolation. Andrew’s own relation to race, status, and family are ambiguous from the start. He is raised, he tells us, “caught” in the “crossfire” of two families—one black, one white (8). Although the law designates him as Jonathan’s property, he is spared hard labor and afforded unusual benefits, including the procurement of a brilliant, reclusive tutor. Thus, Andrew gains a comprehensive understanding of Western and Eastern philosophy (both of which will underwrite the novel’s culminating visions of freedom) before the tutor dies of heartbreak in 1853.
In 1858, Andrew falls in love with a fellow slave from a neighboring plantation, Minty McKay. Moved by love and its extension into a romantic vision of collective, liberationist politics, he approaches Jonathan to express his desire to buy his freedom, as well as Minty’s, George’s, and his stepmother Mattie’s. In a sinister twist, Jonathan agrees but requires that Andrew earn his wages in the service of Flo Hatfield—an “opium-taking, candy-munching,”14 hyper-sexual proto-feminist, whose hunger for power is emblazoned in the name of her plantation, Leviathan. There Andrew spends an ambivalent year as Flo’s male concubine. His indignity is mitigated by comfort and sensual reward but made suddenly intolerable by the news of an unsuccessful slave revolt at Cripplegate. Fearing the scattering loss of family and loved ones, Andrew approaches Flo for back payment, and their discussion escalates to violence. After Andrew punches Flo in the face, she sentences him, along with Leviathan’s coffin maker, Reb, to hard labor in the mines.
Here, the story of fugitive escape begins. Assuming the role of Reb’s white owner, Andrew re-invents himself as an unlucky heir to a family that made, then lost, their fortune in American shipping. (He calls this personality William Harris.) Under this guise, the two enslaved men flee the mines of Abbeville, though their journey north is forestalled by Andrew/William’s unmanageable heroin withdrawal. Forced to stop, for his medical care, in Spartanburg, South Carolina, the dangers of fugitivity are indefinitely prolonged. They are also exacerbated by the appearance of a notorious slave catcher, Horace Bannon (alias: the Soulcatcher). A monstrous antagonist astride “a great war-horse with padded hooves” (66), Bannon represents the immediate and embodied threat of capture, though his terrorizing physicality is complicated by the curious, psychologizing rule that governs his trade: He will enact his capture only when the fugitive himself admits an internal surrender, desiring his own predation. Thus, the Soulcatcher maintains a shadowy, suspenseful perch, as Andrew/William’s life continues. The protagonist is returned to health by the local doctor, he assumes a role as a schoolteacher in order to pay the doctor’s bill, and he courts and finally marries the doctor’s daughter, Peggy Undercliff.
In 1860, realizing that Andrew will never chaperone him north, Reb flees Spartanburg for Chicago, pursued by Bannon. Bannon is unable to capture and kill Reb, but he procures the coffin maker’s ring, which he sends to Andrew as false testament to his victory. Grieving the loss of his former companion, Andrew finally begins to despair, though he knows that despair will be his demise—the first stage of the death wish that is the Soulcatcher’s cue. He goes out in search of Bannon but instead comes upon a slave auction, where the last person to be sold is his childhood sweetheart, Minty, now grotesquely ill. Professing a sense of duty, Andrew purchases Minty, and he and Peggy tend to her in her final days.
Then the Soulcatcher returns. Upon Minty’s death, Bannon appears in Andrew’s doorway, and, in a state of resignation, Andrew submits himself to his tormentor. The Soulcatcher, however, meets him with surprising news. Because Reb has bested him, he has been compelled to resign. So, through Reb’s heroism, Andrew’s life is spared, delivering him from fugitivity to freedom. Andrew’s apprehension of freedom is accompanied by a vision of life as intensely and dynamically interconnected, and in 1861, as the novel’s culminating event, Andrew and Peggy have a daughter. “This,” the protagonist-narrator tells us, “is my tale” (176).
How does such a fantastical story position the contemporary reader in relation to the slave past, and what structures of feeling is it meant to produce or disrupt? Let us find our first clue in Johnson’s self-announcing “essayist interlude” (119), whose condensed, meta-fictional commentary appears approximately two-thirds of the way through the novel, under the title, “On the Nature of Slave Narratives.” Here, an unidentified narrator—ostensibly, someone other than our usual first-person protagonist, Andrew—interrupts the story to describe to the reader the genealogy of antebellum slave narratives. Spanning just over a page, what begins as an annotative digression on the “archival tomb of literary history” (118) turns into a description and endorsement of literary historical retrieval. Put another way, what begins as an explanation of the antebellum slave narrative becomes a theory of the contemporary narrative of slavery.
Starting from the premise that the antebellum slave narrative is “related, as distant cousins are related,” to earlier literary forms, including the Puritan conversion narrative and The Confessions of Saint Augustine, the narrator hypothesizes that “no form . . . loses its ancestry; rather, these meanings accumulate in layers of tissue as the form evolves.” But in a curious turn, the narrator goes on to describe contemporary writing, not as an ongoing accretive enterprise (the accumulation of more layers of history), but as the work of dis-interment (an excavation of history). He proposes: “It is perhaps safe to conjecture that the Slave Narrative proper whistles and hums with this history . . . and all a modern writer need do is dig, dig, dig—call it spadework—until the form surrenders its diverse secrets” (119, Johnson’s italics).
At once confessional and brazenly academic, this narrative “intermission” purports to contextualize the novel, identifying its constitutive, generic ambition. “The modern writer,” we are told, sets out to perform a kind of de-repressive labor, not simply imitating but unearthing and bringing to consciousness a past that is buried but not lost, with a host of “diverse” and promising “secrets.” History, in this view, is invisible but imperishably present and enduringly useful. It is retrievable for modern life, if we will only “dig, dig, dig”—though we are cautioned that the “hole is very deep, the archaeological work slow” (119). Read in isolation, this explication of (late) modern writing would seem to corroborate the hypothesis that under-girds therapeutic and prohibitive reading: that contemporary narratives of slavery work, through performative claims to historical revelation, to effect a meaningful psychic experience. Their achievement is the revelation of secrets, the apprehension of “the wheels as they whir beneath the stage” (118). The implied will of the text, to borrow language from Angelyn Mitchell, is to “emancipate [its] readers from the cultural and historical amnesia that has surrounded the issue of slavery in the United States.”15
But, for Johnson, there is a catch. This position, presented in the moment of its articulation as an earnest, intellectual hypothesis and meta-fictional self-disclosure, has already been ironized by the novel’s preceding 117 pages. For the past that Oxherding Tale recounts consists not in a set of historical facts retrieved and laid bare, like the spoils of an archeological dig, but in a flamboyant fantasy of the slave past that, from the start, renounces its referential duty to any governing ideal of the historical real. With zany plot twists, internal confessions of a history that is “ruin now, mere parable” (3), and conspicuous, comical anachronisms that mock the conceit of historical authenticity, the novel mercilessly, peremptorily contradicts its later, textual instruction to “dig, dig, dig” for a past that will eventually, inevitably, disclose itself (119). So, although Johnson offers a historical plot, rendered roughly according to a familiar literary historical form, it is impossible to believe that, in reading the novel, one is directly encountering the past. We are not, per Morrison’s narrative standard, “thrown ruthlessly into an alien environment as the first step into a shared experience with the book’s population,”16 for in Oxherding Tale, the temptation to forget oneself in the text is summarily, if pleasurably, foreclosed.
Through his twinned representation of historical irretrievability and the contradictory desire to exhume and reconnect with the past, Johnson at once endorses and renders absurd the fictional gesture of historical return. The “archaeological” desire of the contemporary narrative of slavery does not matriculate to fulfillment but, rather, generates a stubborn tension around the subject of history, as the impossibility of historical return is held uncomfortably alongside the persistence of historical desire. How shall we make sense of this internal contradiction whereby Oxherding Tale espouses and mocks, fantasizes and forecloses, the desire for a reparative, historical return?
On this matter, the critical tendency has been to privilege one of the novel’s orientations toward history over the other, to regard one as (triumphant) thesis and the other as (defeated) antithesis. By this rule, either Oxherding Tale succeeds as a contemporary narrative of slavery, by bringing the past to bear on contemporary psychic and political life, or it fails as a contemporary narrative of slavery because it thwarts the post-traumatic imperative to remember. Keith Byerman, a spokesperson for the former view, writes, “At a time when the president himself [Ronald Reagan] was declaring that racism no longer existed as anything other than an individual aberration, Johnson constructed narratives that described the holocaustlike experience of slavery and that implicated current social practices in that history.”17 Arlene R. Keizer, representing the opposite view, foregrounds the novel’s anti-historical bent to assert that its anachronistic lexicon works to evacuate rather than instill historical consciousness. She warns, “Oxherding Tale runs the risk of allowing the reader to forget the real conditions of slavery, and to view the condition of bondage as primarily an existential problem.”18 Though these perspectives diverge in their respective estimations of Johnson’s literary accomplishment, they share a common governing standard whereby literary explorations of racial memory should speak with moral clarity and therapeutic efficaciousness; black historical fiction is deemed supremely valuable when it works collectively and “constantly . . . against . . . the desire to forget,” showing its readers that “the possibility for change is in memory.”19
But as I show now, Oxherding Tale imagines its task otherwise, as evidenced by its overt and protracted use of allegory to expose and displace the very structures of feeling the contemporary narrative of slavery is expected to provoke. If, as proponents of therapeutic and prohibitive reading maintain, black historical fiction is meant to act with immediacy, through a transparent psychic technology of reader identification, then allegory—derived from the Latin allos (other) and agoreuein (“open, declarative speech”)—defies the most basic requirement for such immersive storytelling, “that our words ‘mean what they say.’”20
To be sure, allegorical meaning is not the negation of a story’s ostensible content; the “otherness” of its speech is not self-canceling, but self-abstracting. Although Oxherding Tale’s use of allegory conforms to the agenda of prohibitive reading insofar as it interrupts the possibility for readerly transference and over-identification, it does so, not by renouncing that desire, but by turning the ideal of transcendent therapeutic reading into a “double signpost.”21 Under Johnson’s hand, the complexly wrought human pathos of the fantasy of reparative return is both asserted and abstracted beyond itself; the literary articulation of therapeutic reading redoubles as a story about the desire for therapeutic reading. Through this maneuver, Oxherding Tale elicits a hermeneutical approach that invokes and exceeds the critical horizon of therapeutic/prohibitive reading. The foundational question it puts in the mouth of its implied reader is not, “How will the literary representation of the slave past facilitate or renounce the task of the reader’s psychic betterment?” but “What objects and economies of desire propel African American literature’s historical turn, and what is the role of literature as such in mediating that desire?”
Of course, as the preceding chapters demonstrate, it is not unusual for contemporary narratives of slavery to make use of allegory as a narrative strategy, nor is allegorical reading uncommon within the extant criticism. My own analyses have repeatedly turned to allegory to discern a meta-literary and meta-historical discourse implicit to black historical fiction, and indeed, allegory is one of the most common devices through which writers and critics have encouraged us to draw meaningful connections between historical and contemporary conditions of racial subjectivity, sociality, and unfreedom. Nor is Oxherding Tale anomalous for its refusal to fulfill its internal fantasies of historical desire. On the contrary, a central argument of the present study has been that therapeutic and prohibitive reading too often obscure the contemporary narrative of slavery’s generic skepticism toward the possibility of the catharsis it desires.
What is remarkable about Oxherding Tale is how it enlists allegory and humor as its primary and unrelieved narrative strategies to enact its foreclosure of historical desire. The novel calls up familiar and sincere forms of longing—for historical redemption and repair, for contemporary heroism in the face of unrelieved historical suffering, for assuagement of the losses of the Civil Rights era—but it allows us to see these desires always and only through the prism of exaggerated and self-conscious narrative artifice. The novel’s inclination to pathos is itself inhabited by an inclination to abstraction, such that profoundly vulnerable articulations of love and desire strain against a milieu of merciless humor. Theresa M. Kelley has argued that “because it is wayward, provisional, and openly factitious, modern allegory can assist a line of reasoning that breaks open self-enclosed symbols or systems and thus break out of the ‘habitus’ of culture, whose patterns of received knowledge would otherwise close off inquiry.”22 In what follows, I make a similar case for Oxherding Tale’s capacity to unsettle the presumptive meanings and functions of black historical fiction’s familiar network of symbols, systems, and feelings.
Oxherding Tale describes the contemporary narrative of slavery’s relationship to the past through its protagonist’s encounters with four allegorical figures, each standing in for a distinct aspect of African American literature’s historical desire. These figures are Andrew’s first love, Minty; an eccentric novelist named Evelyn Pomeroy; Andrew’s father, George; and the bounty hunter, Horace Bannon. They represent, respectively, the desire for lost origins, the novel’s own ambivalence toward modern black writing, post–Civil Rights racial melancholia, and the contemporary narrative of slavery’s psychic attachment to historical injury. Roughly translated to the idioms that organize this volume, they represent trauma, depression, and masochism.
Although she is absent from the great majority of the novel’s narrative action, Minty’s presence frames the text at the levels of plot and signification. At the beginning of the novel, Andrew’s love for her catalyzes his pursuit of freedom. At the end, the demands of her suffering and the fact of her premature death compel his moral self-reckoning. Before she dies, her suffering affords Andrew an opportunity for heroism.
Presumably, the protagonist’s relationship with Minty is intended to fulfill the reader’s desire and expectation: to extend recognition to an abject past, to alleviate historical suffering, and to mourn the unmourned dead. In each of these respects, Minty bodies forth the promise that we may counteract the oppressive weight of our impotence, in the present, to redress the wounds of history. Yet, with acerbic self-consciousness, Johnson represents Minty in outrageous caricature, ridiculing the imagined and predictable desire for a character like her in the very act of fulfilling that desire.
A couple of years after he leaves her behind at the Cripplegate Plantation, Andrew accidentally stumbles upon Minty at a covert Spartanburg slave auction. This woman, who once “ensorcelled” him with her “flawed, haunting beauty” (15), has become, by age twenty-two, “unlovely, drudgelike, sexless, the farm tool squeezed . . . for every ounce of surplus value, then put on sale for whatever price she could bring” (155). Andrew purchases her at an outrageous markup, securing his heroism when he offers the reassurance, “I’ve purchased you not to put you to work but, as I promised years before, to buy your freedom” (157). Minty responds with hyperbolic gratitude that undermines the scene’s already tenuous claims to tragedy. Per Andrew’s report, “There is a place where southern women retire when their nervous systems short-circuit, a pleasant region much like a sanatorium, or a Writer’s Colony, and I have often heard it referred to as a swoon; I can describe it no further, having never been there: Men pass out, a few faint, others are knocked out, but men do not swoon, and I thought it improper to trouble Minty about the details of the Ladies’ Psychic Powder Room after she checked back in” (157–158, Johnson’s italics).
Upon recovering from her “swoon,” Minty is taken to Andrew’s home, where she makes herself useful. She cleans, cooks, and instructs Andrew’s new wife, Peggy, on how best to care for him. But in time, illness incapacitates her, and she is confined to bed. In a gesture of love, Andrew attempts to comfort her by inventing an alternative future to her unsalvageable past. He extemporizes a sentimental fantasy of Minty “[standing as] a freewoman” on “eastern beaches [whose] blues and browns . . . contrast the warm hues of her skin,” and it is against the backdrop of this image of redemption that Andrew’s muse dies before him (167).
If Minty stands for the irredeemable suffering of the slave past and Andrew for the redemptive desire of the contemporary, African American literary imagination, then the depiction of her belated rescue suggestively approximates a presentist fantasy that is harbored within therapeutic reading. In this fantasy, the contemporary narrative of slavery becomes the saving grace of historical trauma, extending a holding hand, a soothing voice, a loving eye. It is hardly unorthodox that the desire for trans-historical healing announces itself within the text, nor is it unusual for such a wish to come up against its tragic foreclosure; a similar narrative of reparative desire and its incompletion unfolds in nearly every other historical novel that appears in this study. But Johnson goes further to turn this fantasy on its head. He presents our desire to redeem the past as a desire to make the past swoon. He accentuates our inclination to romanticization and possessiveness, and he confesses, by way of Minty’s domestic generosity, the under-articulated wish that, in return for our remembrance, history will work for us, ordering and repairing the fabric of our daily lives. (Let us not forget, as Keizer rightly notes, that as a matter of law, Minty has become Andrew’s slave.)23 When Minty finally dies, Johnson represents the scene in crude, corporeal detail, refusing his readers both Andrew’s redemptive fantasy and the release of righteous sympathy: “A gush of black vomit bubbled from her mouth onto my hand. The Devil came and sat on Minty, his weight pressing open the valve to her bladder and bowels” (167). To the end, Johnson’s articulation of the forceful, contemporary longing for reparative return is interrupted and undermined by the impossibility of un-self-critically inhabiting that desire.
In order to achieve its intended effect, Johnson’s allegory requires that Minty’s interior life remains inaccessible to Andrew because Minty stands for history, and the point of her character is precisely the impossibility of history’s appearance as a self-articulating presence. Thus, like the bard who sees in his lover the reflection of his own desire, Andrew is unable to parse Minty’s true essence from his projective longing. He admits: “How much of her beauty lay in Minty, and how much in my head, was a mystery to me” (15). But Minty must also and nevertheless stand for a more substantive conception of the historical real, for however irretrievable the immediacy of its experience may be, the history of slavery is a certain fact, the painful reality that propels historical desire in the first place. Thus, Minty bears the burden of representing both the abstracted, imprecise, reparative desire of the present and the still-potent, graphic wound of the slave past. To this end, she alternately appears as an un-harnessable fantasy object (“voluptuously sleepy, distant, as though she had been lifted long ago from a melancholy African landscape” [15]) and, as stunningly, even grotesquely, corporeal (with “work-scorched stretches of skin and a latticework of whipmarks,” a “belly pushed forward [from] the cholesterol-high, nutritionless diet of the quarters,” and the accelerating dis-figurement of untreated pellagra [154–155]).
In light of such characterization, what might the reader feel for Minty? What is the tenor of our sadness when she reappears at the end of the novel, brutalized and dying, or when her body is literally consumed by disease at age twenty-two? Made witnesses to a tragedy that is repeatedly interrupted by the asynchrony and irreverence of Johnson’s narrative voice—a tragedy, in other words, that can never fully come into view—we are unable to inhabit her suffering or to internalize it as our own. Rather than feeling Minty’s pain, we find ourselves in a position akin to Andrew, the narcissistic lover who looks to Minty for confirmation of his heroic loyalty, who frantically, quixotically imagines her redemption, and who struggles to relinquish the history he could not save. “I raved, all my eloquence empty, refusing to release her hand,” Andrew tells us, upon Minty’s death. “In my chest there commingled feelings of guilt I could not coax into cognition” (167).
For the feminist reader (or even her most lukewarm sympathizer), the question of reader response encounters additional complications, most of all because we cannot escape the conspicuous and profoundly unnerving fact that Johnson’s suggestive discourse on historical desire uses, as its allegorical prop, a black woman’s brutalized body, whose self-consciousness is overwritten by that of her passing male purchaser. In the case of Minty, the cost of Johnson’s representational choice—and, some have argued, of Andrew’s own freedom—is revealed to be the extreme disparagement of black, female embodiment. (Is this one source of the “guilt” that Andrew cannot or will not know?) For me, as for other feminist critics who have engaged with Oxherding Tale, this representational economy produces an alienation from the text that exceeds the intended effects of curtailed identification and ironic distance.24
There is more to be said about the feminist recoil Minty inspires, and I return to this topic shortly. Yet I also want to note a complication within this critique. For even if, as Jennifer Hayward suggests, the sadism that befalls Minty is a symptom of Johnson’s own “conflicted attitude toward women,” this interpretation does not exhaust the meaning of Minty’s intersectional subjection to textual disparagement.25 Not as a negation but as an addendum to this view, her fate may be read as a satirical critique of (often gendered) literary displays of suffering, insofar as the gratuitous spectacle of her death aligns with the appropriative righteousness of certain fictions of slavery. Put another way, one may find, in the excess of Minty’s suffering and the emptiness of her character, both a troubling negation of black feminine subjectivity (to which I will return) and a provocative interrogation of literature’s long-standing investment in the spectacular pain and pathos of enslaved women. In the latter respect, Minty’s characterization anticipates Saidiya Hartman’s famous disapprobation of “the ways we [readers] are called upon to participate” in literature’s fixation and relentless “display of the slave’s ravaged body.”26 For Johnson, too, the spectacle of suffering anchors the idea—the false promise—that we can exchange the psychic discomfort of witnessing terror for our own catharsis, therapeutic self-epiphany, or moral inoculation. But where Hartman’s response is to look away from the spectacle, replacing its visual and rhetorical centrality with analyses of “mundane” forms of suffering that are too often overlooked,27 Johnson’s response is to explode the spectacle, to break it apart through intense, satirical magnification.
If Oxherding Tale is a comedy whose currency is cynical excess, then does its mercilessness become the limit of its critique? Is Oxherding Tale reducible to a “clever, sneering lampoon” of the fictions of slavery, reveling in the “faults” of its satirical object? (143). I borrow these cited phrases from the novel’s internal description of an unfinished book by a peripheral character named Evelyn Pomeroy. A number of critics have read Evelyn, an aging schoolteacher and a novelist within the novel, as a humble portrait of Johnson himself.28 I encounter her from another angle, not (quite) as a figure for Johnson’s authorial self-indictment, but as an intratextual confession of ambivalence—and love—that tempers and textures Oxherding Tale’s aggressive animus toward the constitutive fantasies of the fictions of slavery.
Evelyn’s narrative arc is short and, for the most part, insignificant to the broad strokes of the plot. Her allegorical significance is concentrated in a secondhand anecdote that Peggy shares with Andrew about Evelyn’s struggle against the anxiety of influence. Suggestively, this anecdote pivots on the most famous, and most controversial, novel about American slavery ever written: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It was Stowe, Peggy tells Andrew, who inspired Evelyn to become a writer. Evelyn “read her novel and loved it—and loved her—and thought, ‘I have to do that.’” Peggy continues:
“Evelyn is not, as you know, a crusader. . . . Nothing she has written will equal the influence of Stowe. When she saw that, after writing a hundred pages of a protest novel, she also discovered that she hated Stowe’s book. She found faults, first with her novel, then turned on the Novel itself. She dismissed it as dead. She wrote a parody of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a clever, sneering lampoon that was, after the first few laughs, ugly—ugly and spiteful because it burlesqued something it couldn’t be, and all because Evelyn did love Harriet Beecher Stowe. . . . Can you,” Peggy asked herself, not me, “still love and believe in something when . . . you know you can’t have it? (143, Johnson’s italics)
Rather explicitly, Peggy’s description of Evelyn’s literary genealogy points to Johnson’s own, meta-fictional self-reckoning. Like Evelyn, he is a novelist who was first moved to write by the example of politicized art and the moral cause of black history. As he recounts elsewhere, it was Amiri Baraka, in place of Stowe, whose charismatic performance at a public reading left Johnson “in a daze.” “I wondered: What if I directed my drawing and everything I knew about comic art [at the time, Johnson was a cartoonist] to exploring the history and culture of black America?”29 Yet, again recalling Evelyn, Johnson’s early literary efforts were subsequently cast “into the bottom drawer of my filing cabinet,” as the author developed a piercing critique of the forms and figures that originally inspired him.30
But Oxherding Tale is not Evelyn’s “ugly” “lampoon,” precisely because it is painfully, irresolvably aware of its mixed feelings for the overlapping forms of the novel of slavery and the protest novel. Although it parodies these forms with “clever” glee that occasionally sours into meanness, Johnson’s novel persistently declines to “dismiss as dead” those objects of its original, impossible love: the fantasy of reparative return, and the fantasy of literature’s direct and transparent transformative power. Instead, love is resurrected again and again, though it is also demeaned and though it is revealed to be an inconvenience, an embarrassment, and an impracticable wish. Minty, for example, is made ugly and undesirable to absurdist proportions, but she is also kept alive until the very end. The novel overwrites its love object with gallows humor and grotesquerie, but this act of disparagement may well be a melancholic rejection—a rejection that is not one—powered not by organic derision but by defensive projections of the lover’s own failure, resentment, and foreclosed love.
Holding in tension romantic desire and cynical critique, Johnson offers a critical, yet non-annihilative rejoinder to the familiar wish that we, as subjects of the present, are charged with the task of de-repressing and psychically reconciling with the slave past. His counter-claim—which stealthily undermines his own fantasy of a secret-baring literary archaeology—is not that we must abandon historical desire altogether but that perhaps we have fundamentally mistaken the nature and object of repression. Might it be that the repressed of contemporary black fiction is not slavery itself, or even the un-mourned slave, but the difficult knowledge that the desire to redeem the slave past is simultaneously inoperative and inextinguishable? On this view, Peggy’s question gives language to the novel’s most elemental pathos and uncovers, in a new light, the heart of the contemporary narrative of slavery: “Can you . . . still love and believe in something when . . . you know you can’t have it?” (143, Johnson’s italics).
Minty—and with her, the idea of the slave past tendering itself for its or our redemption—is one of Oxherding Tale’s impossible love objects. She represents not only the enduring potency of the slave past in the cultural imagination but also a structure of grief and desire through which contemporary literary consciousness approaches the slave past. Ever elusive and unknowable, (dis-)appearing as a missed encounter, Minty bears the characteristic marks of traumatic memory. In Andrew’s father, George Hawkins, Johnson presents a second impossible love object and an attendant origin story for the contemporary narrative of slavery. This story locates the conception of the modern slave narrator (Andrew) in what George comes to call “the Fall” (7), a scene of disappointed love and foreclosed idealism whose allegorical counterpart is the crucible of post–Civil Rights grief. If the register of feeling that characterizes Minty’s representation is dramatic, romantic, and catastrophic, then George’s depiction retreats from this scale. Where Minty is ethereal and distant, George is commonplace, tangible, “a practical, God-fearing man” (3). And rather than bearing the traumatic sign of belatedness, George is marked by ambivalence and disavowal, the signature of melancholia and its constitutive repression.
At the outset of the novel, George is his master’s favorite slave, but when Jonathan’s drunken prank backfires, George is cast out of the house, losing “in one evening . . . a lifetime of building a good name for himself, winning his master’s confidence, and disproving the grim Negro wisdom that no effort served to alter history and nature” (101–102). Like an ungenerous cliché about the Civil Rights–Black Power era, George moves from naïve hope in gradual, assimilationist progress to an aggressively separatist politics of grievance and recrimination. But before his conversion is complete, he experiences a period of profound, unmasked grief.
Put simply, when George is expelled from the master’s house, he falls into a depression. “His head was lowered . . . [and] his voice was lower, too, softer, more unsure” (101). “I feel like a daid man gettin’ hup ever’ mawnin’,” he tells a friend. “There ain’t nothin’ to hope for, work toward. How kin you go on, knowin’ that?” (105). What George describes is not only disappointment at his reduced circumstances but, more important, disappointment of belief as well—a radical disruption to his long-standing optimism, which held that patience, loyalty, and the assumption of good faith would eventually bring the promise of freedom. “Didn’t those years of service count for something? In all this, George decided, he’d been duped” (102).
Denied his belief in the righteousness of history and the eventuality of freedom, George is consoled and saved from catastrophic despair by a lazy, womanizing narcissist who convinces him that his Fall may in fact have been an awakening, “a period of purification of all things European.” (This friend, who is also Minty’s father, is Oxherding Tale’s most cutting “clever, sneering lampoon” of black cultural nationalism.) The friend’s perspective initially provides George with an adaptive strategy in the face of certain nihilism, but it quickly deteriorates into a “spell of hatred” that interminably forestalls his full apprehension of loss and grief (142). If melancholia is, by definition, a remaking of the self through the foreswearal of an impossible love, then it is surely the psychic model for George’s post-lapsarian reconstitution. The love and loss of something resembling Civil Rights idealism give way to George’s politicized rebirth as a proto-black cultural nationalist.
Furthermore, this love and loss pre-figure the formation of another new identity, as Andrew’s birth into slavery metaphorizes the invention of the contemporary narrative of slavery. Born of post–Civil Rights melancholia and bearing an impossible love for Minty, the unsalvageable slave, Andrew’s biography takes shape as a thinly veiled genesis story of African American literature’s historical turn. In this story, the melancholic devastation of George’s optimistic worldview produces the (re-)birth of a slave, figured as a modern son who will carry an impossible (melancholic) attachment to trauma.
Complicating Johnson’s narrative, Andrew is not a static and transparent representation of George’s proto–post–Civil Rights melancholia but an ambivalent heir to that psycho-affective disposition. Like all children, he identifies with and against his parent; like an ambivalent child, the parody of the contemporary narrative of slavery identifies with and against its original form. Indeed, much as Evelyn begins to write a protest novel only to discover its impossibility and to rage against her forsworn love, Andrew enacts a similar pattern in the name of the contemporary narrative of slavery, initiating an emancipatory labor he cannot fulfill and later converting his impossible desire into a “burlesque” of the love that “couldn’t be” (143). Reflecting the wish that the contemporary novel might redeem the reverberating injuries of the near and distant past, Oxherding Tale begins with Andrew’s vow that “[Minty] and I, George and Mattie—all the bondsmen in Cripplegate’s quarters and abroad—would grow old in the skins of free man” (15). Yet, by the novel’s end, Minty is made grotesque, while George becomes simple, cowardly, and ridiculous.
And yet. “Can you . . . still love and believe in something when . . . you know you can’t have it?” (143, Johnson’s italics). Although George is the novel’s most mercilessly ridiculed character, he is also, persistently, its most beloved. So many of Andrew’s cruelest utterances against his father dovetail with professions of love—a disenchanted love, but one that will not be relinquished. “He would reject me, claiming that I had rejected him, and this was partially true,” Andrew concedes. “But I loved my father. What would I not have given for him to be . . . proud of me?” (142). Denying Andrew both the catharsis of reparative return, on the one hand, and the relief of self-emancipation from historical feeling, on the other, Johnson instead introduces a dynamic and anti-teleological model for conceptualizing the interplay of impossible attachments and warring desires. If Minty, Evelyn, and George collectively produce Johnson’s commentary on African American literature’s historical desire, then a fourth allegorical figure, the Soulcatcher, reorients the reader to this discourse by representing a critical alternative to the hermeneutics of therapeutic/prohibitive reading.
The Soulcatcher—or Horace Bannon, as he is otherwise known—is a villain who is a caricature of a villain. “The slave catcher of all slave catchers,”31 he is an uncouth, sadistic, cloaked “tormentor” with “weapons up the yin-yang, [who] seemed able to sniff out slaves anywhere” (53, 77). Yet the ostensible one-dimensionality of Bannon’s “villainy” is in fact a façade. Bursting from the seams of stereotype in unusual and often alarming ways, he bodies forth an unpredictable threat within a seemingly formulaic and known plot. The most minimally seasoned reader expects Bannon’s appearance to signal for Andrew one of two familiar fates—entrapment or escape—but Bannon surprises both the protagonist’s and the reader’s expectation. We assumed we knew the economy of the book’s fictional reality, we anticipated its movement from slavery to fugitivity to freedom or recapture. Instead, the Soulcatcher discloses that the terms of the hunt are not what they appeared to be, and we find ourselves, with Andrew, “in a different, new . . . relationship with everything [we hold] dear” (148).
More than any other character in Oxherding Tale, Bannon acts directly on the reader, not through his manipulation of sympathetic identification or vicarious traumatization, but by unsettling the reader’s relationship to a known plot, in ways that produce uneasiness, defamiliarization, and terrorized suspense. Blurring the line between the familiar and the unfamiliar to act on the reader’s “moods” and “expectations,” the Soulcatcher brings to mind Freud’s theory of the uncanny—a “species of the frightening” whose mechanism of terror consists precisely in the eerie, self-contradictory co-habitation of familiarity (das Heimliche) and unfamiliarity (das Unheimliche).32
Bannon channels the uncanny not only in his manipulations of the slave narrative as literary form but also in his role as our protagonist’s foil and unnerving double. Freud illustrates the uncanny through the figure of a double that contains the parts of our ego from which we estrange ourselves through repression. This double holds not only “what is objectionable to self-criticism” but also “all the possibilities which, had they been realized, might have shaped our destiny, and to which our imagination still clings, all the strivings of the ego that were frustrated by adverse circumstances, all the suppressed acts of volition that fostered the illusion of free will.” Bearing the ghostly psychic burden of unfulfilled histories and inoperative desires, “the double [becomes] an object of terror, just as [gods] become demons after the collapse of their cult.”33
Consider Bannon in this way: Recalling the image of his would-be victim, the Soulcatcher bears a startlingly hybrid phenotype and dons “clothes [that] were a cross between house . . . and fields” (68), evoking the potent, though unverifiable, suspicion that he is a fugitive in disguise. Moreover, he consolidates Andrew’s most shameful values and traits with a catalog of lost possibilities and unfulfilled desires. He is ruthless, amoral, and anti-heroic, and, as we will see, his mystical body houses the history of Andrew’s lost attachments. Andrew runs from this unwelcome mirror but indicates his covert identification with Bannon when he confesses, near the end of the book, that “only the Soulcatcher knew the secrets of my history and heart. . . . I was . . . bound to him, had produced him from myself” (169–170).
In the constitutive tension that binds and divides Andrew and Bannon, Johnson locates an intra-psychic conflict at the heart of the contemporary African American literary imagination. The Soulcatcher, Andrew’s dogged pursuer, is what the contemporary narrative of slavery represses: its “wounded attachments” to the traumatic past, its vulnerability to seduction by nihilistic despair. These are the shadow impulses Andrew runs from and aspires to out-maneuver, though he feels, persistently, the force of their encroachment. Andrew’s fugitive escape enacts the contemporary narrative of slavery’s avowed impulse toward freedom, but—recalling the Freudian maxim that what is repressed is not banished but continuously strains toward consciousness34—the specter of the Soulcatcher looms over the latter half of the novel, where Andrew lives under the escalating pressure of the warning, “he’ll kill you if you slip” (116).
Again recalling the uncanny, the method of Bannon’s “delicate, difficult hunt” involves the performative duplication of his prey. “It ain’t so much overpowerin’ him physically, when you huntin’ a Negro, as it is mentally,” he explains. “Yo mind has to soak hup his mind. His heart. . . . You become a Negro by lettin’ yoself see what he sees, feel what he feels, want what he wants” (114–115, Johnson’s italics). Over the course of his pursuit, the Soulcatcher gradually absorbs the history of his antagonist’s visions, feelings, and desires. This “[explains] Bannon’s Negroid speech, his black idiosyncrasies, tics absorbed from the countless bondsmen he’d assassinated.” In turn, the fugitive becomes a grotesquely literalized split subject, inhabited by the bounty hunter’s destructive desire (which, Bannon hopes, was the fugitive’s secret desire all along). When the duplication is complete—when the Soulcatcher’s mimetic study locates the fugitive’s countervailing wish for unfreedom—only then does the bounty hunter capture and kill: “His capture happens like a wish, somethin’ he wants, a destiny that come from inside him, not outside” (115). Will Andrew come to desire slavery and thus ensure his demise, or will he remain steadfast in his pursuit of freedom? Can the contemporary narrative of slavery as a literary form out-maneuver the destructive desire that swells within it? Like those novels that take masochism as their organizing trope, these are the questions that push Oxherding Tale’s plot forward.
Yet they are also questions that Johnson provocatively evades. For Andrew does “slip” when he despairs at Minty’s death and the attendant loss of his fantasy of romantic heroism. In this moment, as his tormentor foretold, he sees in Bannon “the familiar quirks of my friend” (169) and “[realizes] the futility of resistance” (170). But in the same moment, Andrew becomes the beneficiary of Reb’s fortitude, and because the Soulcatcher’s retirement precedes Andrew’s onset of nihilism, the plot matriculates neither to Andrew’s victory nor to his defeat. Departing from the plot structure that it ostensibly adopts, Oxherding Tale declines to become a book about Andrew wresting freedom from Bannon or Bannon quashing this desire. The novel’s constitutive tension is not resolved but de-escalated and supplanted by a new model of historical feeling and relationality.
When Andrew learns of his unexpected freedom, he feels a pang of remorse for his father, who died years ago at Bannon’s hands. He asks after George—his question a mixture of mockery, shame, and genuine sorrow—“and then the Soulcatcher did a strange thing.” Unbuttoning his shirt to reveal his upper body, he exposes to Andrew
an impossible flesh tapestry of a thousand individualities no longer static, mere drawings, but if you looked at them long enough, bodies moving like Lilliputians over the surface of his skin. Not tattooes at all, I saw but forms sardined in his contour, creatures Bannon had killed since childhood. . . . The commonwealth of the dead shape-shifted on his chest, his full belly, his fat shoulders and yet all were conserved in this process of doubling, nothing was lost in the masquerade. . . . Behind every different mask at the party . . . the selfsame face was uncovered at midnight, and this was my father, appearing briefly in the dead boy Moon as he gave Flo Hatfield a goodly stroke and, at the instant of convulsive orgasm, opened his mouth as wide as that of the dying steer Bannon slew in his teens. . . . The profound mystery of the One and the Many gave me back my father again and again . . . and, in the final face I saw in the Soulcatcher, which shook tears from me—my own face, for he had duplicated portions of me during the early days of the hunt. (175–176)
In this bizarre and fantastical mirror scene, Johnson re-invents the arc of the freedom quest itself by rejecting the possibility of an un-burdened, autonomous hero. When he first determines to free himself, Andrew makes a vow that prohibitive reading would welcome: that, “whatever my origin, I would be wholly responsible for the shape I gave myself in the future” (17). But the “freeman” Johnson delivers at the novel’s end is, not such a self-determining, monadic subject, but a speaking self perpetually ghosted by that which it necessarily—but never completely—discards. If Andrew’s hopeful premonition was that he would “escape destruction” by eschewing his father and the “strategies that poisoned [him]” (117), then surely he is surprised at the moment when freedom arrives, to be “[given] back [his] father again and again.” Yet neither is patrilineal reconciliation tangible or complete, as proponents of therapeutic reading might wish. Contradiction, bad feeling, lost and embarrassing love objects, impossible desire: These are neither available to retroactive change nor what Andrew must give up in the name of self-possession; they are the inextinguishable conditions of life, which the hero finally confronts in the self-reflecting image of Bannon’s “flesh tapestry” (176).
Making reference to a Zen parable in which enlightenment looks like the transcendence of identity, the novel’s title invites a reading in which the epiphanic revelation of the Soulcatcher’s “tattoo” releases Andrew from his figurative enslavement to the concomitant notions of the liberal subject and the racial self. By abandoning Western taxonomies of identity, the argument goes, Andrew evades the false choice between traumatic enmeshment with, or total detachment from, history and community. Reading thusly, Jonathan Little describes “Andrew’s sea change of consciousness, in which he moves from a primarily ego-centered Western perspective to a Buddhist and Hindu conception of the benefits of the loss of the self.” Similarly, Rudolph P. Byrd finds that, by “achieving moksha [the Buddhist term for enlightenment],” Andrew comes to “[stand] within as well as on the outside of the conventional constructions of race and consciousness. . . . By virtue of this complex positioning, he literally and figuratively bodies forth an alternative mode of being in the world ‘that constitutes an affirmation beyond opposites of all kinds.’”35
To the degree that readings of this culminating scene suggest a triumphalist view of Andrew’s maturation, I am inclined to push back. For one thing, we would be wise to remember that Bannon’s revelation is not the fruit of Andrew’s spiritual achievement; it’s Reb’s.36 As our protagonist clarifies, Reb’s “Way” is one of “strength and spiritual heroism,” but “it was not my Way” (77). Indeed, Hayward, Keizer, and Ahsraf Rushdy have ably shown that, to the novel’s end, Andrew remains flawed and un-self-aware in persistently “Western” and profoundly consequential ways: most of all in his “resolute denial of [the] social forces” that prop up his life of white, “bourgeois contentment.”37 But suppose the Soulcatcher’s “body mosaic” (175) appears not to signal Andrew’s matriculation to the status of post-racial hero but to occasion, for Andrew, the ephemeral wonder of the reader who discovers, in the “text” of Bannon’s body, a new way of seeing the known world. Suppose, in other words, that the triumphalism of the novel’s final pages pertains not to identity but to hermeneutics.38
Like a text, the Soulcatcher’s body bears the inscription of the slave past, mimetically copied in the forms and psychic structures of the dead. “Yo mind has to soak hup his mind. His heart,” Bannon candidly explains, when in an early encounter he instructs Andrew to read him as a faithful record of the un-redeemed, ever threatening to overtake the soul of the present (114–115). In this way, Bannon initially appears as one of the novel’s several descriptions of history’s manifestations in the present, alongside “the archival tomb of literary history” (118) and the romantic fantasy of Minty’s rescue. But when the villain retires, he presents his body to Andrew as a different kind of text, revealing, in his “flesh tapestry” (175), a revision and critical alternative to previously articulated visions of how history may appear in and for literature. Now the history transcribed on the Soulcatcher’s body is a history outside of time. Its disorderly contents are a trove of lost affects and objects, old and new, inherited and acquired. They are not frozen in place, in the strict order and form of their happening, but mobilized in fantastical, irreverent, internally inconstant ways.
Having abandoned the hunt, Bannon is no longer a familiar threat or villain, coercing our hero’s righteous purpose and direction. Discarding the ideals of historical fidelity and redemptive witnessing, he comes into view as a vibrant but aimless repository—a proliferating, “shape-shifting,” ungovernable psychic record of what we still miss, love, or otherwise feel. Through this culminating image of infinite “doubling” and “masquerade,” the Soulcatcher directs the reader toward an alternative hermeneutical expectation: that the act of reading need not deliver us from impossible desire, and that the agency of literature may consist simply in the creative, propulsive recycling of desire. What Bannon offers Andrew in the name of freedom is thus a figure for what African American literature’s historical turn holds out to the contemporary reader: the endless re-presentation of desire as revelation and disguise, the realization of desire’s capacity for unpredictable transformation, and steadfast resistance to the will to be done with desire.
I want to hold on to what strikes me as the useful core of Oxherding Tale’s alternative approach to African American literature, premised on the free-form, re-combinatory circulation of historical desire. But it is also essential to confront the limit of Johnson’s proposed hermeneutic, which we find symbolically condensed in the fact that women are literally un-readable in the text of Bannon’s body. Though the scene of Bannon’s revelation is brief and the sample of his constituents is accordingly small, it is remarkable that neither of the novel’s black women—be it the tragic Minty or the benevolent stepmother Mattie—surfaces in the culminating image of infinite flexibility in our psycho-affective attachments to the past. Indeed, only one woman qualifies for Andrew’s descriptive inventory of the Soulcatcher’s magical display: She is the white slaveholder Flo Hatfield, whose femininity is mitigated by both her infiltration of a masculine economy and the protagonist’s obscuring declaration that “she was the creature of men; she was me” (72). (Even so, Flo’s appearance within “the profound mystery of the One and the Many” reproduces her exclusively as the passive object of male sexuality; 176.)
This limitation is not accidental, nor is it anomalous to the spirit of the book. In fact, throughout the novel, Andrew remains stubborn and explicit in his insistence that women are “remote and strange” to the world of men (16). Following the example of his childhood tutor, he learns to harness his lust and fear by equating women “with Nature (and with terror),” regarding them as “passive objects of fecundity [and] deliberate agents of doom.”39 Thus cloaked in the protagonist’s dread and desire, Oxherding Tale’s women—most of all, its black women—inhabit the book like “a strangely absent presence,”40 imbued with literary meaning but evacuated of character. Which is to say, not only does the novel tend to represent women stereotypically or not at all, it relies on women’s mis- and non-representation in order to produce its system of literary meaning. We may recall, pessimistically, the problem of Minty’s representational abjection, and her enduring subordination to Andrew’s metaphorical needs.
To be sure, this literary stage on which women are ever “illusory like moonlight on pond water” more accurately describes Andrew’s mindset than Johnson’s (16). I would be remiss if I did not mention that the author often seems to be winking at the reader, mocking Andrew’s interpretations by depicting them in comedic hyperbole. Indeed, this is one of the great pleasures of Oxherding Tale for the feminist reader: its teasing caricature of a self-indulgent and objectifying male gaze. Here, for instance, is how Andrew describes Minty in the early stages of his infatuation:
I was stung sorely, riveted to the spot, relieved, Lord knows, of my reason. . . . I saw her eyes—eyes green as icy mountain meltwater, with a hint of blue shadow and a drowse of sensuality that made her seem voluptuously sleepy, distant, as though she had been lifted long ago from a melancholy African landscape overrich with the colors and warm smells of autumn—a sad, out-of-season beauty suddenly precious to me. . . . Her name, now that I think on it, might have been Zeudi—Ethiopian, ancient, as remote and strange, now that something in me had awoken, as Inca ruins or shards of pottery from the long-buried cities of Mu. (15–16)
Even in this abbreviated form, the extraordinary excess of such a soliloquy (to say nothing of its anachronistic ribbing at the masculinist language of racial romanticism) undermines its content. It invites the reader, through laughter, to take the self-serious Andrew down a notch. In this peculiar way, and particularly in earlier portions of the book, Oxherding Tale embeds its own feminist critique of itself in its plainly revealed textual self-consciousness.
What disappoints, then, is not that Johnson is blind to his protagonist’s misogynistic worldview but that he offers no viable alternative through which women can enter into representation. We know that Andrew’s narration is not entirely to be trusted, but this knowledge does not allow the novel’s female characters—their losses, their grievances, their loves, their desires—to come more fully into view. Moreover, this knowledge does not unmake the text’s strategic, symbolic use of women as the primary, often abusively “embodied [sites]” for the novel’s “highly abstract and metaphysical speculations.”41 Without discarding the ambitious promise of Oxherding Tale’s final revelation, what might it look like to more fully realize the gendered dimensions of our thinking about historical desire, particularly from the vantage point of complexly developed women subjects?
For several reasons, this question directs me to Morrison’s Paradise (1997), a novel whose central dramas revolve around the masculinist narration of history, the interior lives of women, and intra-racial embattlements over the task of interpretation. Despite obvious differences in register, style, and plot, Oxherding Tale and Paradise share a strikingly similar narrative project. Both are “serious [works] of fiction which also [function] as [parables]”—and, “effectively and ironically, [as works] of literary criticism”;42 both are concerned with what forms racial remembrance will take in the post–Civil Rights era; both are attentive to the seductions of traumatic and melancholic memory yet critical of nostalgia and wounded attachments to a history of racial injury; both envision history as a palimpsest, at once ineradicable and irretrievable; and both culminate in utopian images of self-consciously—indeed, joyously—impure access to history’s psycho-affective residuum. But to this catalog of shared and fascinating attributes, Paradise adds a direct feminist rejoinder to the feminine absence in books like Oxherding Tale, reproducing for critique a range of assumptions, correlations, and gendered norms and stereotypes that consolidate a dangerous and flawed sense of history as “a male concept of time.”43 Moreover, Paradise issues this critique from a deftly imagined, poly-vocal space of feminine interiority—symbolically concretized as a makeshift refuge for transient, homeless women, at the outskirts of a town “deafened by the roar of its own history.”44
Thus I submit that a reading of Paradise will complicate and extend Johnson’s hermeneutical ideal while also demonstrating its profound applicability and force. In addition, because it is the third and final installment of Morrison’s “love trilogy”—the sequence of novels beginning with Beloved, whose narrative arc spans from the antebellum period to the post–Civil Rights era—Paradise will enable the present study’s circuitous return, through Johnson’s rogue take on the contemporary narrative of slavery to a refreshed encounter with the genre’s ur-text. Here I read Paradise as neither a correction nor a straightforward continuation of Beloved and Jazz but as a diffuse relation that becomes a prism for encountering Beloved’s field-changing exploration of the slave past differently.
Paradise is set in the all-black town of Ruby, Oklahoma, whose dwindling population descends from an insular band of post-Reconstruction homesteaders. Driven out of the Deep South by racist vigilantism and unwelcome in the settlements of their light-complexioned, more affluent brethren, fifteen founding families establish a town called Haven (later relocated and renamed Ruby). Their traumatic origin story becomes sacred communal lore, repeated and reenacted with fidelity so it comes to stand like “some fortress you . . . built up and have to keep everybody locked in or out” (213). Set primarily in the years between 1968 and 1976, the novel follows two conflicts over how to read the past, one internal to Ruby and the other at Ruby’s border with the outside world.
The former conflict grows out of a generational divide. The town patriarchs wish to preserve and transmit the past through mimetic, unadulterated repetition. “As though past heroism was enough of a future to live by. As though, rather than children, they wanted duplicates” (161). The sons question the relevance of Ruby’s traumatic history for their present, marked by communal fracturing and “the desolation that rose after King’s murder, a desolation that climbed like a tidal wave in slow motion” (160). They wish to abandon or transform it, “to kill it [or to] change it into something they made up” (86).
The second conflict pits Ruby against a motley collective of unattached women living at the town’s margins. Rumored to be witches, abortionists, and lesbians, the women defy Ruby’s terms of conservative sociality and historical legibility. Their home, commonly known as the Convent, stands in dramatic contrast to Ruby’s ideal of a restored, insular, and continuous racial genealogy. Whereas Ruby invests in a social fiction of historical constancy, the Convent (which is not really a convent) bears the traces of its re-purposing over time: It has been an embezzler’s mansion, a Catholic school for indigenous girls, and now a sanctuary for women fleeing misfortune. On occasion, women, misfits, and even town elders wander from Ruby toward the Convent, but such action is discreet, proscribed, and generally disavowed.
Here are the plot’s most rudimentary touchstones: Between 1968 and 1973, the Convent acquires four new residents, following disparate, accidental routes from different personal histories and corners of the country. Each woman flees from dangerous or despairing personal circumstances: abusive and unfaithful husbands and lovers, child loss, mother loss, political violence, rape. Stopping at the Convent, “the one place they were free to leave,” they join Consolata, a blind and aging healer who bears witness to their personal histories of unrelieved suffering (262). Consolata is the Convent’s oldest tenant, having arrived nearly fifty years prior, in the care of a nun who rescued or abducted her from an exploited childhood in the streets of Brazil.
When the Ruby patriarchs panic about the families’ diminishing numbers and the next generation’s apathy, the women at the Convent become convenient scapegoats, common enemies to bridge the town’s generational divide. An inter-generational gang of Ruby men plans and executes a raid on the Convent. The raid comes on the heels of a euphoric communal cleansing ritual, in which the Convent women matriculate, to borrow a phrase from Carola Hilfrich, to an “anarchically embodied enunciative position [as] historical and narrative subjects.”45 In a crime of convenience and displaced aggression, the Ruby gang shoots them, but they vanish into the grass.
Paradise is decidedly unsubtle in its depiction and critique of history as a masculinist discourse. Because Ruby’s self-story is secured through a ritual of devotion that requires the replication of the present in the image of the past, its persistence in its being is contingent upon a carefully controlled, insular system of “unadulterated and unadultried” reproduction (217). The continuous narrative of Ruby’s history, in other words, depends upon patriarchal policing of communal boundaries, particularly at the site of women’s sexuality and reproductive potential. As the town historian discovers, “everything that worries [the ruling patriarchs] must come from women” (217).
Moreover, the debate over how to represent and transmit historical legacy is staged as an exclusive dispute between the patriarchs and their would-be successors. Ruby’s public forums are dominated by men, while women’s speech is alternately cast as interior, peripheral, relegated to the private sphere, or otherwise informal. Although the younger men defy their father’s vision of historical legacy, they have no quarrel with masculine power as such. Thus the town’s most prominent public debate takes as its topic the prerogative of the younger men to re-interpret historical decree in their own image, and a hotly contested youthful rebellion consists in a young man’s exogamous sexual pursuit of a forbidden Convent woman. (One recalls Andrew Hawkins’s individuation from George, wrested in declarations of rejection and sexual congress with white women). These sites of conflict and others like them reveal a contested historical discourse that nevertheless consolidates a selective account of what happened—the stories of “Great Men”—and perpetuates an exclusive apparatus of gendered power.
The novel’s critique of patriarchal (or fraternal) historiography finds concise and explicit critique in the mouth of Patricia Best, the town genealogist. Initially reminiscent of the historian-hero of David Bradley’s Chaneysville Incident, Pat begins to record town history through a method that prioritizes the meticulously fact-checked, bare-bones documentation of patrilineal descent: “a collection of family trees; the genealogies of each of the fifteen families. Upside-down trees, the trunks sticking in the air, the branches sloping down” (187). In infrastructure and content, this “history project” reifies Ruby’s “official story” as it is passed down and recited by the patriarchs (187, 188).
But Pat quickly finds herself dissatisfied with the absence of “footnotes, crevices, or questions,” so she begins to “supplement the branches of who begat whom” with increasingly detailed, digressive, and subjective annotations (188, 187). If the family trees recapitulate the authorized public history of Ruby, then Pat’s notes turn to conventionally feminine discursive domains—family Bibles, gossip, and “her students’ autobiographical compositions” (187)—to assemble a more substantive but suppressed account of the past that “starts with the local, the immediate, and the personal.”46 As her notes proliferate, Pat “[gives] up all pretense to objective comment” and discovers that “she didn’t want or need any further research” (187). The family trees remain at the center of her notebooks and continue to exert force over the general direction of events, but the ever-amassing annotations apply a counter-force against the story of patriarchal descent, reframing the focus of familial history within an unruly web of relations.47
To be sure, Pat’s redirected interest does not anticipate her overthrow of Ruby’s patriarchy. On the contrary, she remains subject to the law and logic of Ruby—she is even a ruthless enforcer of the town’s disciplinary judgment—and she ultimately determines that her notebooks are “unfit for any eyes except her own” (187). Still, the content of Pat’s study highlights women’s central role in perpetuating or foreclosing the insular continuity of patriarchal society, alerting Pat to women’s potential to be subversive historical actors. And the form of her study, with its sprawling narrative overgrowth, exposes the official history as selective and partial and foreshadows the Convent women’s radical, anti-genealogical challenge to Ruby’s accepted modes of historical engagement and representation.
If Ruby is a social and narrative space in which women’s counter-memories must be contained or occluded, then from the vantage point of the town’s official history, the Convent women are literal excess. They are “detritus: throwaway people” (4), not only exotic to the numbered bloodlines that make up the town’s population, but unmoored as well from the very formations that would confer social legibility, such as family, genealogy, or a claim to place. Like Haven’s founders, the women are driven to a “backward noplace” (308) by rejection and disappointment, but in almost every way, their micro-society inverts the traits and values of the town. The town is a hermetic space of genetic continuity while the Convent is populated by “drifters”; the town is controlling while the Convent is permissive; the town is consumed with a singular, original trauma while the Convent accumulates discrepant voices like a palimpsest; the town is ordered by patriarchal governance while the Convent is “permeated with a blessed malelessness, like a protected domain, free of hunters but exciting too” (177).
Thus, when the Ruby men descend upon the Convent, what they see is history’s “outside”: what is not only foreign to existing knowledge but fragmentary, meaningless, unable to cohere. Measuring the Convent’s assorted contents against the recognizable structure of the town’s historical self-story, they find nothing legible and nothing worthy of interpretation. Yet, much like Pat’s sparse family trees that cannot hold back the uncontainable proliferation of meaningful detail, the oppositional logic that divides Ruby from the Convent repeatedly breaks down. As Patricia Storace enumerates, “Two Ruby men have affairs with Convent women; another, an alcoholic, experiences a wild detoxification there, unable to admit his addiction within the Ruby city limits. Arnette Fleetwood, who is pregnant by the scion of a prominent Ruby family, a condition all Ruby suspects but will not acknowledge, goes to the Convent with the equally unacknowledged purpose of aborting the child.” Rather than a foreign and unknowable “out there,” the Convent “inadvertently becomes the vault for all of Ruby’s secrets. . . . [Its] dangerous witchiness is as much Ruby’s as its own.”48
Mimicking but exceeding the images of the corrupted distance between town and Convent, and Patricia’s once-orderly but now irrevocably unruly notebooks, Paradise itself crowds out the tidy, redundant narrative of Ruby’s founding through a sheer abundance of women’s voices that de-center and overwhelm it. Morrison allocates an eponymous chapter to each of the Convent women, in which she introduces them through intimate portraits of personal traumas they endure prior to arriving at the Convent. The women are historically situated, and some of their complaints are heavy with historical meaning, but the narration consistently denies the register of historical epic in favor of rich, local detail. In turn, the effusion of detail strains against the contained, linear narrative that the simple chapter titles might lead us to expect. Though the women’s stories are irreducible to one another, they are also porous, meandering, and uncontained by the designated boundaries of the chapters.
Many critics have commented on the difficulty of reading Paradise in light of its unwieldy construction. Louis Menand, for example, makes note of “the energy we have to spend puzzling out the various pieces and getting them into some kind of satisfactory narrative shape.” For Menand, this “obscurity” is classically Morrisonian: “Morrison,” he reminds us, “has always been careful to make her writing elliptical.”49 Without disputing this stylistic point, I would add that the nature and function of Paradise’s narrative complexity is markedly different from that of, say, Beloved. Beloved is challenging and elliptical because its task is to represent the elusive violence of psychic trauma, which is so often experienced as a kind of interruptive recursivity. But traumatic time is not Paradise’s narrative mode (except in some of its internal recounting of Ruby’s history). Rather, the latter text’s difficulty results from a feminist effort to explode the “upside down tree” (Paradise, 187) as the presumptive shape of historical narration. In spatial terms, Beloved destabilizes its chronology by sprawling backward in time; Paradise destabilizes its narrative coherence by sprawling outward in an ever-expanding web of sociality.
The point is not that women are anti-historical or outside of history or beyond historical comprehension—or, as Andrew Hawkins’s tutor posits, that historical thought stands in irreducible opposition to women’s “rhythms of birth and destruction, the Way of absorption, passivity, cycle and epicycle” (Oxherding Tale, 31). Rather, Paradise challenges us to re-imagine or re-invent history’s narrative form, with attention to how gender, a social form, structures our most entrenched understandings of the legible world. What constitutes an event? What kinds of relationships or attachments merit representation? What forces—psychic and material—bind the self to the community? Through what kinds of formations do we recognize historical continuity or discontinuity? What do we long for, and what do we long to expunge when we look to the past? If the consuming question facing contemporary black literary studies has been how to conceptualize the meaning and relevance of the racial past, then Paradise seeks to understand how this inquiry is pre-figured by the gendered politics of who and what get to count as historical in the first place.
Symbolizing both what Ruby represses and a fantasy space that defies extant norms of historical intelligibility and organization, the Convent is the edifice through which Morrison most expansively imagines alternative and foreclosed approaches to historical representation, interpretation, and desire. Significantly, its built environment invites us to imagine, not an Edenic history without patriarchy, but a post-patriarchal domain of possibility, where the articulation of “every true thing is okay” (38). Morrison actively avows our inheritance of a violently masculinist record of American history in the Convent’s architecture and interior design. “This masculinist mansion of iniquity, turned Convent”50 bears the traces of history’s obfuscating desire, fear, and reverence for women in its bizarre and unfocused assortment of objects and signs: The embezzler’s lewd and opulent décor peeks through the nuns’ austere and pious remodeling. What is novel about the Convent, then, is neither its content nor its infrastructure but the manner in which it is inhabited and repurposed when it becomes, in Erica R. Edwards’s words, “a sanctuary for women and a queer space that allows for the doing of different things.”51 Carrying their own psychic baggage and material effects, the drifting women overwrite their dwelling like a palimpsest, allowing the Convent to come into view as a site of arbitrary and intentional human interaction antedated by past events that unevenly intrude upon the conditions of the present. As a lens on to the past, Paradise’s post-patriarchal Convent is capacious, accommodating, and dis-interested, as well as mystical, female, and multi-ethnic. This is why it is precisely what the Ruby patriarchs must excise to reify their own, immobilized and over-determined account of a teleological, self-authorizing past.
How and what do the women write on the palimpsestic text of history? In the novel’s climactic scene, Morrison depicts this act as a healing ritual and an exorcism, which begins in the mansion’s cellar and matriculates to its garden. Consolata—familiar yet deified, the women’s “ideal parent, friend [and] companion” (262)—officiates a ceremony that begins with a series of acts resembling “a ritual practice of the Afro-Brazilian religion, Candomblé.”52 First, the women undress and lie naked on the floor, bearing witness to Consolata’s personal testimony of love and loss, as she paints outlines of their bodies in each woman’s chosen posture. “How should we lie? However you feel” (263). Literally etching the “sensualized externality of [each woman’s] inward [life]”53 onto the subterranean chamber—the unconscious—of the house of historical accretion, Consolata’s “templates” allow the women to convert their shapeless histories of suffering into a collaborative and open-ended search for “what [they] are hungry for” (262). Rising from their templates, they join in a collective act of testimony: “That is how the loud dreaming began. How the stories rose in that place. Half-tales and the never-dreamed escaped from their lips to soar high above guttering candles. . . . And it was never important to know who said the dream or whether it had meaning. In spite of or because their bodies ache, they step easily into the dreamer’s tale. . . . In loud dreaming, monologue is no different from a shriek; accusations directed to the dead and long gone are undone by murmurs of love” (264).
The women’s speech acts are accompanied by embellishments to their sketched bodies. They fill the outlines with figurative and abstract symbols—“careful etchings of body parts and memorabilia.” “They spoke to each other about what had been dreamed and what had been drawn,” urging the conversation forward “but gently, without joking or scorn” (265). Eventually, after their arduous labor of coming into representation, they emerge from the Convent, free to express without encumbrance “the rapture of holy women dancing in hot sweet rain” (283).
As a unique form of expressing the past, “loud dreaming” defies the most basic requirements for coherent, historical representation. It is un-invested in narrative wholeness, it demands no proof or attribution, it is poly-vocal and not homogenizing, and it accommodates abstract, non-narrative expression. Perhaps most surprisingly, it subordinates the reification of meaning to the experience of speaking and witnessing. This is why it never matriculates to a fixed and repeatable story, even as it compels engagement and leaves a lasting mark.
Morrison stresses that, although the women succeed in wresting narrative form from the “cellar” of their repressed possibility, their stories remain largely incomprehensible to the uninitiated. “A customer stopping by would have noticed little change” (265). More consequentially, when the Ruby men raid the mansion, they find nothing more than a succession of disorderly and indecipherable scenes—pornography, they surmise, and “Satan’s scrawl” (303). Thus the achievement of self-representation is rendered distinct from the guarantee of reception, and the act of the women’s triumphant testimony does not mitigate their vulnerability to attack. (If anything, it does the opposite.)
And yet, the ritual of “loud dreaming” does appear to usher the women into a space of magical existence, ambiguously kin to immortality and figuratively reminiscent of the indefinite afterlives of literature itself. Shortly after the raid, all of the women are presumed dead—four of them shot down as they ran “like panicked does” through the grass behind the mansion, and one shot and killed in plain sight (18). But when the undertaker arrives to retrieve the bodies, all of them have mysteriously vanished. The reader learns none of the details that might explain this magical disappearance, nor is she privy to how or why, in the book’s final pages, the women flicker back into view, in a series of brief, de-contextualized fantasies of each woman’s narrative resolution. If, as Storace cleverly proposes, the Ruby men “treat Ruby like authors who want to stop the life of their work at the moment of writing, [unable to] endure . . . the myriad readings and misreadings it will encounter beyond the author’s conception of it,”54 then Morrison’s implausible re-introduction of the women at the novel’s end would seem to express an opposite wish, inviting the reader to engage in the imaginative, promiscuous re-circulation of the Convent women’s stories.
Presenting an imaginary space in which traces and symbols of the past circulate in indefinite, recombinatory relation, the Convent ritual and its aftereffects bring to mind the lively necropolis of the Soulcatcher’s tattoo. Both retain the un-fixed residue of trauma, loss, love, and desire. They value and invite memory as a psychoanalyst might: as “the past, ghost-written as desire, [and] driving us into the future.”55 But Morrison also offers an important variation on Johnson’s vision of such an ideal. As we have seen, Andrew’s description of the Soulcatcher’s “flesh tapestry” tacitly reifies the domain of the historical in conventionally masculine depictions of hero and event—hunting, sexual conquest, and father-son reconciliation dominate the scene, and indeed, the author’s awesome vision of creative infinitude is tellingly contained in the hyper-masculine body of a violent man. Bursting through the apparatus of narrative containment, Morrison gives us the figure of magical, vanishing women, and radically reimagines what counts as worthy of narration, delving into the mundane and dramatic depths of women’s lives.
Here, we must note that the Convent holds more than the specific history of this fictional frontier town. It is also inter-textually penetrated by other ghostly formations that produce a dreamy, intangible exchange between the women’s twentieth-century memories and feelings and a broader range of historical event and affect. This is how Paradise asserts its place within the series that begins with Beloved: not through genetic connection, in the way that Jazz introduces us to Beloved’s probable son, but through the kind of compulsive figural, thematic, and imagistic repetition Freud associates with serial dreams that “[form] part of the same whole, . . . giving expression to the same impulses in different material.”56 Infusing Paradise with the uncanny sensibility of a serial dream, Morrison redescribes a house of women haunted by ghost children and saturated with mother and daughter loss; the mysterious arrival of a ravenous daughter who emerges from a watery trauma and introduces herself by spelling her name; a spiritual mother figure who guides a collective in reclaiming and loving their pained bodies; the merging of women in a ritual of grief closed off from the outside world; the exorcism of ghosts; and the magical vanishing of women in the grass behind the haunted house.
What, we might wonder, does Beloved mean in and for Paradise? Taking my cue from Morrison’s un-catchable women, I want to resist the impulse to a fixed, teleological interpretation. One could argue, of course, that Beloved is Paradise’s true origin, so that the latter text’s meaning is ultimately traceable to the former text’s discussion of slavery’s traumatic persistence in memory. Or, following Freud’s belief that repression is often loosened through repetitious speech, one could read Paradise as a later version of Beloved that brings to the surface some of the earlier novel’s latent content. But I submit that the repetition of cryptic images moves, not toward resolution, but toward a thicker description of Morrison’s historical impulse as it appears in “different materials.” Its priority is not the discernment of cause (which historical locus is origin, and which is effect?) but a more intimate apprehension of historical desire’s multi-directional pathways.
On this view, we may accept the tautology that historical trauma intensifies the grief of contemporary loss, while contemporary loss triggers, and perhaps hides itself in, a catalog of earlier, linked losses. Reading the love trilogy in this way, as part of an irreducible, non-teleological composite, displaces Beloved’s widely conferred status as primary or original and recasts the novel’s singularity of focus on the slave past as part of a broadly constellated literary discourse on post–Civil Rights, African American historical desire. To the degree that Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise work together as a trilogy, they do so by co-producing an open circuit of proliferating re-description and interpretive possibility, leading the reader away from the expectation of certain, “sermonizable” meaning (Paradise, 297), toward “the threshold of mystery.”57 Evocative and un-containable, the recurring figure of the woman who escapes or disappears or “erupts into her separate parts” (Beloved, 323) bears the trilogy’s hermeneutical key: an ideal of interpretive non-closure.