Reader, text, and subjectivity: Toni Morrison's 'Beloved' as Lacan's gaze qua object

As a white reader of Morrison's narrative, on the other hand, the text's anamorphic vision allows me to "know too much" (Zizek 44), and my ego begins to dissolve as my subject status splinters. Readers in this position experience themselves as objects when they realize that the African-American text is gazing at them, signifying something about themselves. In Morrison's texts, the fantasy object (the exotic other) cripples the subject by gazing back. While some readers (certainly some of his contemporaries) are threatened by Faulkner's texts, Morrison's montage technique creates anxiety by revealing a Lacanian piece of the real through the menacing gaze of the other. Zizek explains how Hitchcock's tracking shot zeros in on an anamorphic spot, or something that sticks out. His movement from montage to tracking closes in on the gaze, causing anxiety in the viewer. Lacan posits that the essence of the gaze is a "gratuitous showing, [causing] . . . some form of 'sliding away' of the subject" (Four Fundamental 75-76). Thus, in the movement from montage to tracking, Hitchcock, and, I suggest, Morrison, zero in on the gaze to create anxiety in the viewer/reader. Zizek calls this gaze the "Hitchcockian blot" (88), the gaze of the other that reduces the viewer/reader to object. Like Hitchcock, Morrison creates this gaze by moving from a montage of differing perspectives and points in time to focus on the uncanny often in the form of "inhuman" behavior - the unspeakable - thereby fissuring the text. In this way, Morrison succeeds in giving voice to the unspoken, those "invisible [repressed] things [that] are not necessarily 'not-there'" ("Unspeakable" 11).

In explaining how the gaze operates, Lacan states, "I see only from one point, but in my existence I am looked at from all sides" (Four Fundamental 72). These multiple views of people define them according to their multiple constituencies. Lacan further proposes that identity comes from the other: "the subject, in initio, begins in the locus of the Other, in so far as it is there that the first signifier emerges" (Four Fundamental 198). If one is defined by what others see, then one's identity shifts with one's audience. This mechanism, whereby identity derives from the Other, allows one to occupy different subject and object positions simultaneously. For example, a wealthy black woman's identity shifts with the gaze of the Other, depending on whether that gaze focuses on class, race, or gender. Likewise, a white Jewish laborer maintains multiple identities. Thus, the characters in Beloved sustain their identities through the rotation of differing gazes. Sethe and Paul D shift identities depending on who (for example, Mr. Garner, schoolteacher, or other black characters) is viewing them. Morrison presents various African-American perspectives - male/female, parent/child, slave/free, old/young - that illustrate competing multiple constituencies. By bombarding the reader with varying perspectives, her narrative technique arouses the reader's own multiple identities. The reader's reactions to characters may shift as Morrison presents a variety of angles of definition: Sethe (old and young, young girl and mother, slave and free); Denver (child, dependent/independent); Beloved (child, woman); and Paul D (male, slave and free). By engaging with these multiple aspects of character identity, a reader undergoes a shifting between subject and object positions as a result of changing points of view and alternate defining gazes.