Abstract
This study explores Morrison’s A Mercy as a palimpsest, both in terms of its adoption of multiple narrators and in the way, landscape is layered with vestiges of history, myths, and most importantly, with traces of black women creativity. Reading landscape in Morrison’s novel as a multi-textured palimpsest entails an assessment of the interplay of ethnicity and gender in the novel. This study finds in Alice Walker’s employment of the symbolic connotations of the “garden” to depict the creativity of black women discussed in her book In Search of Our Mother’s Garden (1984) a theoretical framework for interpreting Florens’s creativity in reading the land and the development of her identity in relation to the natural realm. This study also explores the palimpsestic aspects in Morrison’s text both synchronically and diachronically. The diachronic aspect examines the way Morrison’s A Mercy delves into history towards earlier representations of the American landscape and shows how her text reads and overwrites others. As a model of intertextuality, the palimpsest enables Morrison to overwrite the writings of American Transcendental figures such as Emerson and Thoreau, who have gained precedence in writing and visualizing the American landscape. Conversely, the synchronic angle addresses the implications of Morrison’s adoption of multiple voices, which are laid over each other and either rival or endorse each other in the form of a palimpsest. Reading each experience as a separate layer reveals other minor embedded layers that surface through Morrison’s stylistic language and evocation of smells and colours.
Highlights
We live in a land where the past is always erased and America is the innocent future in which immigrants can come and start over, where the slate is clean [emphasis added]
This study explores Morrison’s A Mercy as a palimpsest, both in terms of its adoption of multiple narrators and in the way, landscape is layered with vestiges of history, myths, and most importantly, with traces of black women creativity
Reading landscape in Morrison’s novel as a multi-textured palimpsest entails an assessment of the interplay of ethnicity and gender in the novel
Summary
We live in a land where the past is always erased and America is the innocent future in which immigrants can come and start over, where the slate is clean [emphasis added]. The key contribution of this study lies in its argument that Morrison’s A Mercy can be read as a palimpsest, both in terms of its narrative structure and in the way, landscape is layered with vestiges and traces of memory. While Morrison’s A Mercy is a story told by multiple narrators from different perspectives that subvert any single narration of events, this study explores the affinities this text holds with a medieval palimpsest, where multiple stories are written and overwritten, with one eradicating or perhaps supporting another It explores how Morrison layers her landscape with vestiges of black women’s creativity that question the authority of dominant accounts of American history that tend to devalue black women and nature. The concept of the palimpsest deconstructs and complicates patriarchal ideas that posit that images of landscape are governed by the concept of the palimpsest deconstructs and complicates a European American projection of history
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