Love 's Time and the Reader: Ethical Effects of Nachtr�glichkeit in Toni Morrison's Love

Abstract

Love's Time and the Reader:Ethical Effects of Nachträglichkeit in Toni Morrison's Love Jean Wyatt (bio) "The structure is the argument." Toni Morrison Temporal discontinuities and nonlinear narrative structures characterize many of Toni Morrison's novels. Morrison's fictions, taken as a whole, rewrite African American history—a history of disruption, dispossession, and displacement; in her later novels especially, formal breaks in chronological sequence reflect these upheavals and the psychic dislocations that accompany them. In Beloved, for example, disturbances of temporal sequence reflect, among other things, the traumatic displacements of the Middle Passage, which severed the enslaved Africans from their land, their culture, their ancestors, and their past.1 In Love the characters' severance from their past is a personal, not a world-historical event, an individual rather than a collective trauma. Yet in one respect at least, Heed's and Christine's experience parallels the experience of the captive Africans on the slave-ships: as a result of an early traumatic separation from the love that had been the ground of their childhood development, Heed and Christine lose connection with their past and its rich field of potentials and are consequently disoriented with regard to their present and future. The events that disrupt their temporal order are themselves a violation of chronology: Heed's marriage at eleven to her twelve-year-old playmate Christine's grandfather, the successful black entrepreneur Bill Cosey—and, hidden behind that marriage, the earlier intrusion of adult sexuality into the childhood world through Cosey's molestation [End Page 193] of Heed. From the moment Heed is catapulted untimely into the world of adult sexuality and marriage, Heed and Christine lose the ability to order their lives fruitfully in relation to time's passage. Narrative displacements reflect the protagonists' temporal disorientation, so that the time of the reading is itself discontinuous: we witness the effects—the long wasting of Heed's and Christine's lives—before we uncover its cause, the premature marriage, nearly two-thirds through the novel; and we are privy to the beginning of things—to the deep love between Christine and Heed when they were young girls—only at the end of the novel, after 183 pages of witnessing the two women's bitter enmity. The ending not only overthrows our expectations of narrative sequence, but reveals that the text has misled the reader about the most basic question one can ask about a novel: What is this story about? At the end, the new information about the characters' past—about the events that caused the whole sequence the reader has just processed—makes the reader reconstruct everything that has come before: the story centers not on the wanderings of male desire, as we had been led to believe, but on the mutual love of little girls. The structuring of Love around a time lag in the reader's relation to systems of meaning suggests a new perspective on Freud's model of Nachträglichkeit (variously translated as deferred action, après-coup, and afterwardsness)2—and new ways of using that temporal paradigm to illuminate reader response to the asymmetries of nonlinear narrative structures like Morrison's. This complex temporal structure, which Freud recognized in many of his hysterical patients, is composed of (at least) two scenes widely separated in time: in the first scene a child is exposed to some action on the part of an adult, usually a sexual act of some kind, that the child does not have the requisite knowledge or psychosexual development to understand. Years later, after the child has passed puberty and entered the world of adult sexuality, a second incident occurs that through some superficial resemblance reminds her of the first scene, and she reacts with the emotional and cognitive responses that would have been appropriate to the first scene. Jean Laplanche, the contemporary theorist responsible for elaborating Freud's nachträglich model, often cites the example of "Emma" from Freud's Project for a Scientific Psychology (Freud 411–16; Laplanche 38–43). At the age of eight, Emma goes into a shop to buy candy, and the shopkeeper gropes her through her clothes while grinning; Emma, not yet inducted...