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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison's Later Novels by Jean Wyatt Todd McGowan (bio) Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison's Later Novels. Jean Wyatt. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2017. 248 pp. There is no shortage of critical attention directed at Toni Morrison's novels, but this critical attention has seldom invoked psychoanalytic theory. 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). In her new book Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison's Later Novels, Wyatt has returned to the conjunction of psychoanalytic theory and Morrison's novels with a most welcome result. Not only does Wyatt advance the cause of understanding Toni Morrison with this book, but she also shows how Morrison's novels themselves function as the source for psychoanalytic revelations. The theoretical point of departure for Wyatt in this work is Jean Laplanche. 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. The premise of Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison's Later Novels is that a major shift occurs in Morrison's literary career with the publication of Beloved. Almost universally acclaimed as Morrison's greatest novel, Beloved reveals the historical trauma of slavery as a fundamental barrier whose distorting power never ebbs. Slavery inserts itself within the dynamic of the mother and child, with the result that this relationship suffers from either a traumatic break or from an over-proximity deriving from the attempt to compensate for this break. Once slavery enters into the maternal equation, there is no way out. Morrison paints a radically pessimistic picture of the chances for love in Beloved, but the novels that follow, as if [End Page 114] in response to the bleakness of Beloved, become much more sanguine. According to Wyatt, Morrison begins to see love emerge as a possibility because we have the ability to re-signify the past. The past may be determinative, but it is always open to change through the process of Nachträglichkeit. This concept, first developed by Freud and then expanded on by Laplanche, concerns a traumatic encounter that the subject experiences as insignificant when it occurs. It is only afterward, when the subject develops a symbolic framework, that the encounter becomes traumatic, or more specifically, that the subject actually experiences it as such, as if the trauma had hung in the air waiting to be activated by the changed situation. Whereas Freud sees Nachträglichkeit only in cases of trauma and its belated effects, Laplanche, following the lead of Jacques Lacan, recognizes it in every childhood encounter with the other. The initial encounter with an other always involves a fundamental ambiguity about the other's desire, and it is only subsequently that we resolve this ambiguity into some sort of signification. Laplanche states, "What is crucial is the fact that the adult world is entirely infiltrated with unconscious and sexual significations to which adults themselves do not have the code. Furthermore, there is the fact that the infant does not possess the physiological or emotional responses corresponding to the sexualized messages it is being offered; in short, the child's means of constituting a substitutive or temporary code are fundamentally inadequate" (1992/1999, p. 127). The child experiences a desire without a signification and only later can make sense of it. As Laplanche sees it, the traumatic past does not determine the future. It is the future signification that gives sense to the past that precedes it. This has, Wyatt contends, radical implications for how we conceive of love. Love is possible because we can change the past, because we can, through Nachträglichkeit, break from...