Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison's Later Novels by Jean Wyatt (review)

The one conspicuous exception to this truism among Morrison's critics is Jean Wyatt, the author of the most important essay on Morrison's most important novel—"Giving Body to the Word: The Maternal Symbolic in Toni Morrison's Beloved" (1993). Taking up Laplanche's under...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:American imago 2018-04, Vol.75 (1), p.114-118
Main Author: McGowan, Todd
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
African American literature
Children
Essays
Morrison, Toni (1931-2019)
Novels
Psychoanalysis
Slavery
Theory
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:The one conspicuous exception to this truism among Morrison's critics is Jean Wyatt, the author of the most important essay on Morrison's most important novel—"Giving Body to the Word: The Maternal Symbolic in Toni Morrison's Beloved" (1993). Taking up Laplanche's understanding of Nachträglichkeit (which Wyatt translates as afterwardsness and which others have rendered as belatedness), as well as his concept of the enigmatic signifier, Wyatt shows us a Toni Morrison who sheds new light on the relationship between trauma and love and who provides an alternative way of thinking about community, one compatible with psychoanalytic theory despite its inherent suspicion of the possibility of subjects coexisting together. According to Wyatt, Morrison begins to see love emerge as a possibility because we have the ability to re-signify the past. [...]a mother does not have the time for her children that she would if she were not a slave.
ISSN:0065-860X
1085-7931
1085-7931
DOI:10.1353/aim.2018.0005