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

Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber

In her introduction to the 1995 PMLA issue on "Colonialism and the Postcolonial Condition," Linda Hutcheon proposes that in place of a unitary subject, definitions of postcolonial should yield a "'multiplication' of identities . . . and the intersection of nation, gender, sexuality, class, and race, as well as history, religion, caste, and language." She concludes that "race, class, gender, and sexuality all participate in the complex politics of representation," and therefore suggests "multiple constituencies of postcolonial theory and practice" (11-12). Homi Bhabha concurs that these multiple subject positions "inhabit any claim to identity in the modern world" (Location 1). The act of reading, that is, the interaction between reader and text (what Wendy Harding and Jacky Martin call the "interface . . . between cultures in conflict" [6]), further reflects the role of intersubjectivity in identity formation. The following discussion explores how the text of Toni Morrison's Beloved illustrates how identity components intersect in the maintenance of subjectivity.(1) A multiplication of identities occurs on several levels: within the text, character identity alters according to changing interactions with others; simultaneously, the reader's subject position fades, then reinscribes itself as a result of encountering the text.

My interest in this reader-text interaction emerged as a result of reading Beloved. I was captivated by Morrison's texts in the same way that I was with Faulkner's novels (the subject of my doctoral dissertation). What was it about Morrison's work that recreated my experience with Faulkner's, and how were these experiences similar or different? Both authors use a circular, open-ended, evocative, "feminine" style, both emphasize the power of memory, and both reenact and resist racism. Yet Morrison's world registers as much more distressing and alarming than Faulkner's. I wondered how my multiple constituencies - female, Jewish, white, middle class, American - interact with Morrison's text. In other words, when and how does the reader, who begins the text in a subject position, become the object of the gaze of the narrative? To address this question, I would like to consider what Slavoj Zizek refers to as the "gaze qua object" in Morrison's Beloved, with brief introductory comments about Faulkner's texts.

In Seminar XI, Lacan describes the paradoxical relationship between the gaze and the eye: "In the scopic field, everything is articulated between two terms that act in an antinomic way - on the side of things, there is the gaze, that is to say, things look at me, and yet I see them" (Four Fundamental 109). Zizek explains that "the eye viewing the object is on the side of the subject, while the gaze is on the side of the object. When I look at an object [text], the object is always already gazing at me, and from a point at which I cannot see it" (109). Readers, like observers of a painting, become the object of the text at the moment that some "phallic" spot, some "paradoxical point undermines our position as 'neutral,"objective' observer. . . . This is the point at which the observer is already included, inscribed in the observed scene - in a way, it is the point from which the picture [text] itself looks back at us" (Zizek 91). Zizek suggests that in nostalgic works, as through the naive and innocent gaze of a child, the reader or viewer sees "in the object (in the image it views) its own gaze . . . 'sees itself seeing' . . . [providing] the very illusion of perfect self-mirroring" (114). But, as Zizek explains, Lacan proposes an

irreducible discord between the gaze qua object and the subject's eye. Far from being the point of self-sufficient self-mirroring, the gaze qua object functions like a blot that blurs the transparency of the viewed image. . . . [T]he function of the nostalgic object is precisely to conceal the antinomy between eye and gaze - i.e. the traumatic impact of the gaze qua object. . . . [T]he gaze of the other is in a way domesticated, "gentrified"; instead of the gaze erupting like a traumatic, disharmonious blot, we have the illusion of "seeing ourselves seeing," of seeing the gaze itself.

(Zizek 114)

Zizek argues that in contrast to this harmonious viewpoint in nostalgia, montage produces the disruptive gaze qua object through discontinuous shots, or "fragments of the real," producing a "surplus of the real" that is "the gaze qua object" (116).(2) For example, Hitchcock's montage revolves around a "'spot': the stain upon which reality revolves, passes over into the real . . . [and] coincides with the threatening gaze of the other" (Zizek 116).

Thus, the reader's perception of the gaze of the Other affects how the reader experiences the text. For example, a gaze such as that found in Morrison's text presents the subject "as other than he is, and what . . . [it] shows him is not what he wishes to see. It is in this way that the eye may function as objet a, that is to say, at the level of the lack" (Lacan, Four Fundamental 104). The gaze, which operates on the scopic level, the level "of the desire of the Other . . .[,] is the closest to the experience of the unconscious" (Four Fundamental 104). Thus, the reader experiences the gaze of the text in relation to his/her unconscious desire, a desire shaped by various and competing multiple constituencies. Lacan states that the objet a, which represents the "central lack of desire[,] . . . in the field of the visible is the gaze" (Four Fundamental 105). This gaze, according to Lacan, operates to define one's subjectivity from the outside. In Freudian analysis, what is repressed is repeated in behavior, especially in the act of transference, or the "transfer of powers from the subject to the Other, . . . the locus of speech and, potentially, the locus of truth" (Four Fundamental 129). Yet Lacan posits that

transference is the means by which the communication of the unconscious is interrupted, by which the unconscious closes up again. Far from being the handing over of powers to the unconscious, the transference is, on the contrary, its closing up. . . . [T]he discourse of the Other that is to be realized, that of the unconscious, is not beyond the closure, it is outside . . . [and] calls for the reopening of the shutter. . . . If the transference is only repetition, it will always be repetition of the same missed encounter. . . . [T]he unconscious . . . which is inside the subject . . . can be realized only outside, that is to say, in that locus of the Other.

(Four Fundamental 130; 131; 143; 147)

In these terms, the gaze in Morrison's text functions as the discourse of the Other, functioning outside the unconscious and facilitating a momentary "reopening of the shutter" to provide glimpses of what is repressed. These moments produce the pieces of the real that unsettle the reader.

Within this framework, I suggest that readers' responses to texts such as Morrison's Beloved and Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust differ as a result of the presentation of the gaze qua object. Both authors write about the African-American experience so as to delineate the lingering psychological and social effects of slavery. Yet, while Faulkner's work paints a moving and sorrowful picture of the South, Morrison's work - haunting, unsettling, brutal - hits one on a more visceral level. For example, at the close of Intruder in the Dust, I am appeased by the triumph of innocence and the bright outlook for the future. But the ending of Beloved only disturbs and burdens me and disrupts my peace of mind. While reader response differs depending upon "multiple constituencies," I suggest that my varying responses stem from a different engagement with the gaze of the other. Faulkner's nostalgic treatment masks the antinomy between eye and gaze, while Morrison's montage strategy produces the "surplus of the real" that is the "threatening gaze of the other." Faulkner's text reveals the evils that white society would like to repress (reminiscent of "minstrel" show stereotypes), but not the gaze of the other (for example, the African-American perspective). In other words, the reader of Faulkner, to borrow Zizek's term, fails to "look awry," missing the anamorphic spot.

To illustrate the distinction between masking the anxiety produced by glimpses of the real and unmasking this anxiety, the phenomenon of minstrel/blackface proves useful. As early as the sixteenth century, as part of the Commedia dell'Arte and performances of Shakespeare, white actors blackened their faces (often with burnt cork) to portray black characters (Leonard 3).(3) This practice of whites performing in blackface serves to mask identity anxiety on the part of whites. By "acting out" in blackface the identity of the Other, the actors (and, vicariously, the audience) ensure their subject positions; "the blackface minstrel could assert his superiority by making blacks the butt of his comedy" (Ostendorf 68). White anxiety becomes masked as blackness; therefore, blackface reconstitutes white identity (Tate). Through this vehicle, the white subjects "see themselves seeing" and avoid confrontation with the gaze or the real. In a similar way, the nostalgic presentation in Faulkner's text enables white readers to "see themselves seeing."

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.

Lacan explains how this shift between subject and object positions operates: "The world [that defines us] is all-seeing, but . . . it does not provoke our gaze. When it begins to provoke it, the feeling of strangeness begins too" (Four Fundamental 75). That is, our recognition of the gaze or anamorphic spot unsettles the subject position and induces the "uncanny" sensation of dislocation. In response, "[f]rom the moment that this gaze appears, the subject tries to adapt himself to it, . . . [and so] becomes that punctiform object, that point of vanishing being with which the subject confuses his own failure" (Lacan, Four Fundamental 83). The struggle to reinstate equilibrium, to recover subject status begins. If successful, "the subject manages, fortunately, to symbolize his own vanishing and punctiform bar (trait) in the illusion of the consciousness of seeing oneself see oneself, in which the gaze is elided" (Lacan, Four Fundamental 83). As Zizek has pointed out, nostalgia performs this elision of the gaze in order for the viewer/reader to sustain subjectivity.

But it is the point of recognition of the gaze, that unsettling reader movement from subject to object, that Morrison captures in her narrative. In opposition to the nostalgic perspective, her presentation of the gaze in Beloved accounts for the emergence of the real. Thus, in revealing the real, or what is repressed, the gaze illuminates the Other and what we hesitate to recognize about ourselves. Our recognition and discomfiture are complicated by levels of identity and identification. The gaze - the Other, the repressed - reveals the slippage, the cracks, the real object of our desire and the lack it represents. The reader as a subject is undone by the gaze precisely because desire sustains social reality, but when desire is revealed in the form of the real, subjectivity disintegrates. Thus, only when the interior world of another threatens one's own interior is it possible to perceive another reality (Alcorn). Zizek postulates that it is only in the phallic process that one can recover another reality because it is in the phallic stage that reality shifts to the real, a movement from "an overall view of reality to its point of anamorphosis" (Zizek 95).(4) Consequently, while Faulkner perhaps mirrors the reader's gaze with an idealized view (Zizek's oral process), Morrison disrupts the reader's interior world with the gaze of another reality that inscribes the reader in the resolutely unflinching African-American perspective. Yet, in the wake of this unsettling gaze, the reader shifts from subject to object only to negotiate (defensively) a return to a place of (perhaps altered) subjectivity.

Thus, we can look at Morrison's Beloved as a performative representation of the gaze through the signification of black culture. This articulation of culture and history from the point of view of the marginalized and through the cultural embodiment of the gaze of the other reinscribes that culture and the Other. Consider Beloved as a montage of differing realities, of the multiple identities within the text. Morrison's montage reveals points of fissure, or the real, on a phallic level, just as Hitchcock's tracking shot captures differing aspects of reality. Morrison's text is a cultural manifestation of multiple constituencies that disrupt or overturn dominant cultural views of blacks as absent or negated. The retelling of the story, in pieces, by different narrators and from different points in time, confronts the reader with the gaze(s) of the Other, moving that Other from object to subject and thus threatening the subject position of the reader.

Bhabha asserts that the identity of the Other emerges through the "articulation of cultural difference" or the iteration of the "excess of" difference (Location 1-2). This articulation enables the object to become subject. At the same time, this creation of identity of difference generates a sense of the

unhomeliness - that is[,] the condition of . . . cross-cultural initiations. . . . The recesses of the domestic space become sites for history's most intricate invasions. In that displacement, the borders between home and world become confused; and uncannily, the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting. (Bhabha, Location 9)

Morrison's text creates this unhomeliness for the reader in the points where the real emerges, producing for the reader a sense of unease in the shift from object to subject when the traditional object - Other - becomes subject. Points of fissure in the narrative, the places where pieces of the real emerge, signify the gaze of the Other and point to the nullity of the reader's own subjectivity. These locations in the text exemplify Lacan's statement that "[t]he message, our message, in all cases comes from the Other[,] . . . 'from the place of the Other'" ("Of Structure" 186). These varying points in the text, materialized through shifts in perspective, create a bombardment - the montage - of pieces of the real. And it is in these fissures that the characters perceive their own object positions so as to claim their subjectivity. Morrison consciously opens Beloved in medias res so that the

reader is snatched, yanked, thrown into an environment completely foreign . . . . Snatched just as the slaves were from one place to another, from any place to another, without preparation and without defense. . . . One of its purposes is to keep the reader preoccupied with the nature of the incredible spirit world while being supplied a controlled diet of the incredible political world.

(Morrison, "Unspeakable" 32)

Her montage technique compounds this effect by revealing the "unspeakable" through the gaze of the Other.

2

Beloved tells the story of Sethe's cruel treatment as a slave, her courageous escape to freedom, her murder of her infant daughter that she commits in order to save her daughter from an unlivable life with her brutal owners, and the return of her daughter's troubled spirit. Morrison's text discloses a variety of perspectives - race, gender, class, historical experience - that reinscribe culture through the Lacanian gap between "the (prior) subject of the utterance" and "the (present) subject of the enunciation" (Snead 123).(5) These multiple constituencies surface in what Andrew Levy calls Morrison's "community of narrative voices" (115). Sethe and the other characters - Paul D (an escaped slave), Denver (Sethe's daughter), and Beloved (Sethe's dead daughter) - all reveal a piece of the real in those moments where they gain subjectivity through their acute perception of their object status. The text uncovers events in a circular way, in bits and pieces, from different characters, building to the work's final interchange of voices when Sethe, Beloved, and Denver shut out the rest of the world and become "free at last to be what they liked, see whatever they saw and say whatever was on their minds . . . unspeakable thoughts, unspoken" (199). The effect of the narrative is rather like what Paul D feels when he listens to Sethe tell of her ordeal: "It made him dizzy. At first he thought it was her spinning. Circling him the way she was circling the subject. . . . No, it's the sound of her voice; it's too near . . .[,] like having a child whisper into your ear so close you could feel its lips form the words you couldn't make out because they were too close" (161). The reader experiences this unsettling sense of the text's being too close, that is, its view of an unconscious reality that threatens subject status.

Sethe acts as subject at several points in the novel: first, when she leaves on her own to meet her rescued children and bring her baby girl her milk; next, when she gathers her children in the shed and attacks them to save them from a worse fate; and finally when she faces Paul D at the novel's close and accepts her own powerful identity. The event that motivates her agency in the first two incidents is the horrifying attack by schoolteacher and his nephews when they steal her milk: "two boys with mossy teeth, one sucking on my breast the other holding me down, their book-reading teacher watching and writing it up" (70). This episode represents the moment when Sethe sees herself as object in the gaze of the other.(6) She connects schoolteacher's scientific study of her - she has overheard him tell his nephew to "put her human characteristics on the left; her animal ones on the right" (193) - with this attack. When she seeks defense from Mrs. Garner and receives as a consequence a whipping, she transfers from object to subject status: "No notebook for my babies and no measuring string neither" (198). She describes her newborn subjectivity eighteen years later, at her enunciative site:

"I did it. I got us all out. Without Halle too. Up till then it was the only thing I ever did on my own. Decided. And it came off right, like it was supposed to. . . . I birthed them and I got em out and it wasn't no accident. . . . Me using my own head. But it was more than that. It was a kind of selfishness I never knew nothing about before. It felt good." (162)

Her recognition of her object status - as a sub-human specimen as opposed to that of mother - enables her to move to subject status as she carries out her motherly duty of bringing her children to freedom and safety. During her first month of freedom, Sethe must learn, with the help of others, "how it felt to wake up at dawn and decide what to do with the day. . . . [S]he had claimed herself. Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another" (95).

This new subject position is shaken, however, when Sethe sees schoolteacher coming down the road. Again, she asserts herself by gathering up her four children and taking them into the shed for slaughter. She recounts to Beloved in retrospect that her "plan was to take us all to the other side where my own ma'am is" (203), where they would finally be safe. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese explains in Within the Plantation Household that because children were the "master's property," some slave women felt that "by killing an infant they loved, they would be in some way reclaiming it as their own" (324). Thus, Sethe's plan for infanticide and self-mutilation represents her assertion of her own subjectivity in defiance of her object position in schoolteacher's gaze. The reemergence of schoolteacher foregrounds Sethe's slave identity, and Sethe must flee this identification to regain her equilibrium and subject status.

Sethe is compelled to convince Beloved that she killed her out of love, and she urgently seeks validation from her, the Other. Here Beloved becomes the gaze from which Sethe can regain her subjectivity. Lacanian theory explains Sethe's position by positing that the "subject is always a fading thing that runs under the chain of signifiers" ("Of Structure" 194). If "'[t]he unconscious is the discourse of the Other,' . . . [then a] person's assurance of existing can only be gained through the Other's recognition of him/her" (Leavy 210-12). When Sethe tells Beloved that it was out of love that she sought to save Beloved from "anybody white [who] could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. . . . Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn't think it up" (251), she justifies her agency as a rejection of object status for herself and her children.

Worn out from her obsession to regain her subjectivity and to give Beloved her own subjectivity, however, Sethe lies still, hoping to die peacefully, but must confront Paul D when he appears. "She opens her eyes, knowing the danger of looking at him" (272), that is, the danger of his gaze that will unleash her unspoken thoughts. Paul D, reflecting her slave life and the hardships they both endured as objects in the South, will shake her subjectivity by reminding her of what she has repressed. For example, she filters thoughts about her monstrously scarred back, a reminder of her whipping as a disobedient object who sought agency through Mrs. Garner. Other painful thoughts that lie buried are those of her own mother's desertion of her, an abandonment that confirmed her object status. Also, she does not want to think of her sons' fearful escape from her when she violently asserted herself as subject. With Paul D's return, Sethe fears that she will confront herself as object in the gaze of this man who fled when he heard of her heinous crime. Instead, she finds in his gaze herself as subject: "You your own best thing, Sethe. You are" (273). The reader confirms this assessment by way of what Bhabha describes as an "unhomely" moment of shocking "recognition of the world-in-the-home, the home-in-the-world" ("World" 141).

At other moments, Sethe gains a stronger subject position from her perception of herself as object. In order to pay for Beloved's gravestone, for example, she prostitutes herself with the stone carver. Thinking back to this encounter, she contemplates herself as object in the midst of agency:

Ten minutes for seven letters. With another ten could she have gotten "Dearly" too? She had not thought to ask him and it bothered her still that it might have been possible - that for twenty minutes, a half hour, say, she could have had the whole thing, every word she heard the preacher say at the funeral . . . engraved on her baby's headstone: Dearly Beloved." (5)

She attains the gravestone on his terms, not on her own terms. Adding to her degradation is the memory of seeing herself as object in the eyes of the carver's son: "rutting among the headstones with the engraver, his young son looking on, the anger on his face so old" (5). While such memories constantly threaten Sethe's subjectivity, the moments of self-recognition allow her to shift back to a subject position to regain her balance. Despite her limited means, then, she is able to bury her daughter properly.

Another moment of shifting occurs with her retrospective enunciation of her successful birthing of Denver with Amy's help. First, Sethe remembers her painful escape and how she lay down to die when she could go no further. She enumerates her hardships as object in life as well as in death: "That on a ridge of pine near the Ohio River, trying to get to her three children, one of whom was starving for the food she carried; that after her husband had disappeared; that after her milk had been stolen, her back pulped, her children orphaned, she was not to have an easeful death" (31). But her vision of herself is interrupted by the arrival of Amy, who helps her to shelter, nurses her bleeding back, restores circulation to her feet, and assists with Denver's delivery. Amy's responses (especially her assessment of Sethe's ruinous back - "What God have in mind, I wonder") confirm Sethe's piteous state (79). Yet she gains strength from Amy's gaze and gains subject status when she pictures how "two throw-away people . . . wrapping a ten-minute-old baby in the rags they wore . . . did it appropriately and well" (84-85). Instead of dying, Sethe survives to reach her destination and start her new life with her children, full of hope and with "milk enough for all" (100).

3

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.

Paul D's memories confirm his object status. When he is recaptured after an escape attempt, he learns the "dollar value of his weight, his strength, his heart, his brain, his penis, and his future" (226). Schoolteacher will try to trade him "for $900 if he could get it. . . . They put a three-spoke collar on him so he can't lie down and they chain his ankles together" (227). Because Paul D's past recalls his life as object, he must bury it in order to function as subject in the present. As it is for Sethe, "the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay" (42). After the horrors of prison life, Paul D "had shut down a generous portion of his head, operating on the part that helped him walk, eat, sleep, sing" (41). What little subjectivity Paul D has consists of repressing his sense of self as object.

Yet because Sethe threatens his object status, Paul D fears the opening of what he has hidden from view. He questions his ability ever to be subject, to rise above the "bad whiskey, nights in the cellar, pig fever, iron bits, smiling roosters, fired feet, laughing dead men, hissing grass, rain, apple blossoms, neck jewelry, Judy in the slaughter house, Halle in the butter, ghost-white stairs, choke-cherry trees . . . or the loss of a red, red heart" (235). As he ponders how the gaze of the Other molds his subjectivity, he thinks that when he sees himself through the eyes of his good master Garner, he sees one thing (himself as subject). But through Sixo's (a fellow slave's) eyes, he sees another: himself as object, unlike Sixo, who, when being burned to death as object, asserts his final subjectivity by yelling "Seven-o!" and thus naming his soon-to-be-born child (226). But Paul D also marvels at how some gain subjectivity from another's love. He notices that when Sixo arrives, his woman "is lit now with some glowing, some shining that comes from inside her. Before when she knelt on creek pebbles with Paul D, she was nothing, a shape in the dark breathing lightly" (225). Later, when Denver's beau comes for her, she "turned to him, her face looking like someone had turned up the gas jet" (267). Paul D recalls that the first purchase he makes with money he himself has earned "made him glow" (269). His reflections thus illustrate the power of the Other to confer self-worth and self-knowledge.

Paul D overcomes his fears about the past and his own fragile identity to face Sethe and the demons of 124 Bluestone Road and to gain his subjectivity. In an attempt to run from his own past and object status, he had run from the horror of Sethe's infanticide. When he returns, "[h]e looks toward the house and, surprisingly, it does not look back at him. Unloaded, 124 is just another weathered house needing repair" (264). When he returns mentally to his moment of mortification in his collar, when Mister reduces him to object, he contrasts this experience with the gaze of Sethe, who "left him his manhood" eighteen years earlier by neither mentioning nor looking at the collar (273). It is to Sethe's gaze that he finally returns to reclaim himself as subject, to "put his story next to hers" (273). Through the articulation of his "unspeakable" past, Paul D emerges as subject. As he does so, a reader's sense of secure subjectivity shifts, undermined by the momentary loss of the Other as receptacle of what he/she expels from the self.

Like Sethe and Paul D, Denver, who has led a sheltered life, afraid of the world outside her door and those things that might cause her mother to murder again, gains her subjectivity at the end of the novel. Throughout most of the novel, Denver lives as an object smothered by the fear that her mother will take her life just as she had taken Beloved's. In order to preserve peace, she "disappears," loses her hearing, and takes her sister's ghost as her only companion. The "monstrous and unmanageable dreams about Sethe found release in the concentration Denver began to fix on the baby ghost" (103). She daily relives her sister's death, imagining that Sethe "cut my head off every night" (206). Denver struggles to achieve subjectivity through her mother's stories about her birth, and thus she "hated the stories her mother told that did not concern herself, which is why Amy was all she ever asked about" (62). Beloved's appearance assists Denver's growth as subject: "It was lovely . . . being pulled into view by the interested, uncritical eyes of the other. . . . Needing nothing. Being what there was" (118). Denver's object status, created by her mother's heinous acts and her own fear of the white world, shifts as she perceives herself as subject through the eyes of others. She recalls her grandmother's words about whites: "Grandma Baby said there was no defense - they could prowl at will, change from one mind to another, and even when they thought they were behaving, it was a far cry from what real humans did" (244). Yet, as she becomes a subject, she imagines a conversation with her deceased grandmother:

But you said there was no defense.

"There ain't."

Then what do I do?

"Know it, and go on out the yard. Go on." (244)

Seeing herself as agent, through her grandmother's gaze, Denver acts so as to save herself and Sethe from the spell of Beloved. The more Denver asserts herself and her needs, the more reinforcement she receives from others. For instance, when she seeks aid from her former teacher, Mrs. Jones, Denver "did not know it then, but it was the word 'baby,' said softly and with such kindness, that inaugurated her life in the world as a woman" (248). Denver's new command creates a gaze that discomfits readers, who, like the rest of Denver's community, "were sorry for the years of their own disdain" (249). Subsequently, Denver's subjectivity produces an unsettling shift for the reader.

At the novel's close, when Denver realizes that Beloved has worn down her mother and that if Sethe dies, she herself might become the object of Beloved's rage, Denver comes into her own as a subject. When she finds the strength to conquer her fears, leave the house, and find food and work, she marvels, "[i]t was a new thought, having a self to look out for and preserve" (252). This new subjectivity is expanded through the words of Nelson Lord, the same boy who caused her to block her hearing eighteen years earlier when he defined her as object of a murderous mother. Now, when he says, "[t]ake care of yourself, Denver" (252), Denver perceives herself as worthy, and risks asking the Bodwins for a job. Although her new employers have a coin bowl in the shape of "a blackboy's mouth full of money . . . [with] the words 'At Yo Service'" (255), she maintains her new sense of agency.

4

Finally, it is Beloved, in her attempt to gain subject status by returning from the dead, who signifies the unspoken horror of oppression. We have seen how she serves as a catalyst for subjectivity in Sethe, Paul D, and Denver. Yet it is in her own search for validation from the Other, her desire for someone to "touch me on the inside part and call me my name" (116), that makes her the site of resistance to the parasitic nature of slavery: the usurping of the Other's subjectivity in one's own service. She first appears as a paradox, weak but strong, sick but healthy-looking. Metaphorically, she embodies white consumption of black: "The bigger Beloved got, the smaller Sethe became . . . . Beloved ate up her life, took it, swelled up with it, grew taller on it" (250). Beloved confronts Sethe as she searches for answers, for meaning, for her self. She searches for someone "to want me to say me my name. . . . I have to have my face. . . . I am looking for the join" (212-13). Beloved seeks her subjectivity in her interface with the Other, and for a time she seems to have succeeded. In their reciprocal relationship, Denver comes to adore Beloved, who takes away her loneliness; Beloved gains her subjectivity through their friendship. Likewise, Sethe "learned the profound satisfaction Beloved got from storytelling . . . [and] found herself wanting to, liking it" (58). Yet when Beloved perceives herself deserted by Sethe and Denver as they run into the crowd around Bodwin, she dissolves. "Sethe is running away from her . . . leaving Beloved behind. Alone. Again. Then Denver, running too. . . . And above them all, rising from his place with a whip in his hand, the man without skin, looking. He is looking at her" (262). Robbed of her subject position and the object of the white gaze, Beloved believes she is forgotten, "[d]isremembered and unaccounted for It was not a story to pass on. . . . By and by all trace is gone" (274-75).

And yet those traces are not gone; the story is passed on. More than that, Morrison reinscribes the story by transferring the role of object to the reader. From this uncomfortable position, the reader feels the weight of oppression in the return of the repressed. Beloved, the unclaimed and unnamed, figures as the haunting phantasm, the anamorphic spot that will always return and is always present. She embodies the multiple components of subjectivity, both the personal (for Sethe, Denver, and Paul D) and the cultural (for her own community and the white one). In the house where the unspoken speaks, her interaction with Sethe and Denver reflects the desire for the self in the Other: "You are my sister/You are my daughter/You are my face; you are me. . . ./You are my face; I am you" (216). Her cultural manifestation of the site of patriarchy and points of resistance echoes Raymond Williams's description of how emerging cultures carry residues of past and present ones. Beloved functions, as Bhabha suggests, "to release from erasure and repression, and to reconstruct, reinscribe the elements of the known" ("World and Home" 146). The gaze of Beloved signifies the constitutive role of the Other. Her destabilizing effect results from the reader's recognition that it is impossible to erase the split between the Other and the self, to recover the lack, and the recognition of both the self and the Other as meaningless signification. This lack, or object of desire, sustains our identity and is searched for in the Other. Thus, Lacan postulates that "the cause at the level of the unconscious . . . [is] fundamentally, a lost cause" (Four Fundamental 128). Contact with the gaze of the Other allows for a brief opening up of the unconscious to reveal the lack, a process that momentarily dislodges subject status.

Thus, Morrison succeeds, as Timothy B. Powell points out, in de-centering "the white logos . . . to discover the powers which lie hidden in the black logos" (749). Her text reveals what Adell describes as a "dark shadow, the subtext of black existence and its un-said and un-sayable history, the dark shadow of one dark body, the one who is there but is never seen or seen to speak, the shadow of an indirect seeing, but persistently and insistently one who has always been and will be there" (140). This "indirect seeing" emerges in Morrison's moments of disruption, when the pieces of the real, the anamorphic spots, cause the reader to "look awry." By shifting the gaze, and thus the reader's subject position, Morrison's text portends new signifying structures to represent multiple constituencies.

Notes

1 For further reading on the intersection of race and gender see Sandra Adell, Elliott Butler-Evans, Harding and Martin, Denise Heinze, Catherine Rainwater, and Barbara Hill Rigney.

2 The meaning of Lacan's elusive term "real," one of three structures of subjectivity that he identifies in addition to the "imaginary" and the "symbolic;" has been a central problem in the study of his works. In the translator's note to Ecrits, Alan Sheridan, in cooperation with Lacan's son-in-law Jacques-Alain Miller, provides a short but authoritative description:

The "real" emerges as a third term, linked to the symbolic and the imaginary: it stands for what is neither symbolic nor imaginary, and remains foreclosed from the analytic experience, which is an experience of speech. What is prior to the assumption of the symbolic, the real in its "raw" state (in the case of the subject, for instance, the organism and its biological needs), may only be supposed, it is an algebraic x. This Lacanian concept of the "real" is not to be confused with reality, which is perfectly knowable: the subject of desire knows no more than that, since for it reality is entirely phantasmatic. (Lacan, Ecrits ix-x)

The real represents our limitations: that which is beyond cognition through images and signifiers postulates a void, a lack, the unattainable; the imaginary (where imagistic representations offer differentiations between the self and other) and the symbolic (which creates a verbalized subjective reality through language) produce subjectivity in response to the real. Mark Bracher further explicates:

The Imaginary and the Real registers refer, respectively, to what are, in a certain logical sense, preverbal and postverbal aspects of the subject. The Imaginary is constituted by schemata of memory and cognition that are dominant before the child learns to speak, while the Real in the subjective economy is constituted by those aspects of the subject's being that have been excluded from the categories of language. (23)

3 For further reading on the blackface phenomenon, see Ralph Ellison, Sander L. Gilman, Doug McClelland, and Robert C. Toll.

4 Zizek describes "oral" representation as the simple shooting of an event, a "direct 'rendering of reality,'" where viewers "remain captive of the illusion that [they] . . . witness a homogeneous continuity of action registered by the 'neutral' camera" (89). In the "anal" stage, Zizek explains that montage combines heterogeneous pieces to "create new metaphorical meaning" (89). Finally, the phallic stage presents "the detail that 'does not fit,' that 'sticks out' from the idyllic surface scene and denatures it, renders it uncanny. It is the point of anamorphosis in a picture . . . - in a way, it is the point from which the picture itself looks back at us" (Zizek 90-91).

5 Bhabha describes this reinscription as "a 'time-lag': an iterative, interrogative space produced in the interruptive overlap between symbol and sign, between synchronicity and caesura or seizure . . .[,] part of a strategy of cultural survival in conditions of political contestation which necessitates a relocation of the specificity of difference or the incommensurable" ("Postcolonial" 59-60).

6 In his analysis of Lacanian subjectivity, Zizek discusses Peter Brooks's version of Bizet's Carmen, describing Carmen as "an object for men, her power of fascination depend[ing] on the role she played in their fantasy space[;] she was nothing but their symptom" who becomes a subject "when she realizes that she is just a passive element in the interplay of libidinal forces. . . . From the Lacanian perspective, 'subjectification' is thus strictly correlative to experiencing oneself as an object" (64).

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