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

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In these moments when Sethe becomes subject, readers move toward objects as they see themselves in Sethe's gaze. These moments of powerful enunciation of the Other bombard the reader, accounting for Morrison's chilling effect. Both the graphic details and repeated mention of Sethe's "unspeakable" experiences create Sethe's gaze. The white reader would prefer to avoid the truth of Sethe's reality: "Drain her mother's milk, they had already done. Divided her back . . . - that too. Driven her fat-bellied into the woods - they had done that. All news of them was rot. They buttered Halle's face; gave Paul D iron to eat; crisped Sixo; hanged her own mother. She didn't want any more news about whitefolks" (188). Readers respond to this gaze according to their multiple constituencies of identification and sources of anxiety. For example, besides feeling the oppression of white society, white female readers might share Sethe's sense of vulnerability as a woman and mother. But Sethe's gaze rattles the readers' subjectivity by unearthing what has been projected onto the other - the buried truth:

Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. . . . But it wasn't the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. . . . It spread . . . until it invaded the whites who had made it. . . . Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own. (198-99)

No one escapes such an anxiety recreated by the phallic operation of the text. This fleeting "reopening of the shutter" into the unconscious reflects Lacan's notion that "it is in the space of the Other that [the subject] . . . sees himself and the point from which he looks at himself is also in that space. . . . [I]t is in the locus of the Other that he begins to constitute that truthful lie by which is initiated that which participates in desire at the level of the unconscious" (Four Fundamental 144). Readers recover from this momentary shifting subjectivity, but the reality experienced by others has touched their own.

Like Sethe's, the narrations of other characters point to moments of self-recognition that help them move beyond their object status and alter the reader's subjectivity. When Paul D (one of Sethe's fellow slaves at the Garners and a friend of her husband) is captured and given the bit and collar, he sees himself in the eyes of the rooster, Mister. "Mister, he looked so . . . free. Better than me. . . . Mister was allowed to be and stay what he was. . . . But wasn't no way I'd ever be Paul D again, living or dead. Schoolteacher changed me. I was something else and that something was less than a chicken sitting in the sun on a tub" (72). In this moment, Paul realizes that Mr. Garner had given him a false sense of selfhood because schoolteacher teaches him that he and the other slaves are just "trespassers among the human race" (125). He then stores his life in a "tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be" (72-73) in order to survive the chain-gang experience of living buried underground in a box and his subsequent life on the run.