"1 + 1 = 3" and Other Dilemmas: Reading Vertigo in "Invisible Man", "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts", and "Song of Solomon"

Abstract

... the metaphor of the chain of communication picks up the sense of contingency as contiguity, while the question of the link immediately raises the issue of contingency as the indeterminate. (Homi K. Bhabha 188) I won't even talk about the cultural heritage from Africa. (Ralph Ellison, Going to the Territory 66) By representing aporia, dislocation, and caesura through vernacular space, Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977) asserts that Amos Tutuola's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954) and Ralph Ellison's In visible Man (2952) constitute linked gestures toward the diasporic sensibility within which Morrison situates her own work. This strategy of foregrounding aporetic impasse and lapsed rhetorical connections addresses a significant tension in Ellison's work, recuperating an apparent blindness toward African retentions operating at the level of deep structure in his own text. Morrison's revision explores these moments of blindness in Ellison's text and exposes their contours. Relying on black vernacular motifs inspired by Ellison, Morrison's narrative strategy also reveals that, taken together, the three texts chart both individualized and collective evolutions of diaspora consciousness across national and geographic boundaries. These generational shifts reveal sites of neocolonial cultural arrest, rupture, and vi olence, thematized through a network of allusions to ascent, suspension, and rotation. In contemplating these representations as spatiotemporal features of diaspora culture, Song of Solomon constructs African diaspora subjectivity through what I will call an aesthetics of vertigo that reconfigures the of Black space. This usage of the term psychogeography posits, after Lefebvre, that, in the production of social space, foreclosed zones of resistance can be made habitable. (2) Such transgressive spaces are frequently represented through narratives of cultural chaos inscribed as incoherence and vertiginous anxiety, as in both Ellison and Tutuola. Morrison participates in these representations, but claims a route to equilibrium by rewriting vertigo as a liminal site of creative tension that can be better understood in the context of African diaspora cosmologies. These hybrid cosmologies which support her protagonist's acclimation to a vertiginous, diasporic subjectivity are derived primarily from Yoruba and related traditions, including Ifa, Vodoun, and hoodoo, and from archetypal figures within these traditions, particularly Obatala and Eshu. For the purposes of this essay, vertigo is an element in Ellison's and Tutuola's work that for Morrison becomes a vernacular event that reveals a habitable space organized by diasporic cosmologies, in which autopoesis, self-creation, can be realized. All three texts encode vertigo as more than inexplicable instances of perceptual disturbance. Vertigo captures the relationship of the internal experience of the colonized to the colonized environment. As the authors explore the uncharted spaces of diaspora subjectivity, they confront the unarticulated implications of vertigo as a cultural phenomenon. In environments organized by neo-colonialist constructions of race, the protagonists face unavoidable assaults on their humanity, sanity, and cultural coherence. In the aftermath of slavery, Tutuola's nameless protagonist occupies the emblematic position of having no right to describe myself (170). Milkman lack[s] coherence, a coming together of the features into a total self (Song 69). They experience the effects of colonialism and racism as psychological trauma, generally represented as fragmentation or splitting, framed by Du Boisian double-consciousness, as is evident when Tutuola's protagonist later comments, that we left ourselves on the road to beco ming slave and master (171). Because they inhabit places dominated by colonialist hegemonies that confront them with abnormally hostile negations, the protagonists lack spaces in which to redefine and voice themselves. …