Sula

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Sula

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Quiz

• 1. Why does Shadrack start National Suicide Day?
  (X-tra credit When is the first National
  Suicide Day celebrated?)
• 2. What occasion prompts Nels one and only trip
  outside of Medallion?
• 3. Who is it who only wanted a place to die
  privately but not quite alone?
• 4. Whats the difference in the way Hannah and
  Eva handle men?
• 5. So, whats Plums problem? Why does Eva burn
  him up?
• 6. How does Sula defend Nel from the Irish boys?
• 7. what does Shadrack say to Sula? What do you
  think it means?

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Shocking Events

• This is a novel full of shocking events.
• List some . . .
• How do you respond to them?
• What do you think Morrison is trying to do by
  piling up all of these horrible stories?

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Sula and The Bluest Eye

• Morrison has observed that Sula is the story of
  Claudia and Frieda grown up.
• What connections do you see between the two
  stories?

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Opposites/Pairs

• What are some of the oppositions / pairs /
  dualities that Morrison plays with in this first
  part of the text?
• Intro.
• Bottom/Top
• Nightshade/Blackberry
• Nigger Joke who is fooled? (p. 2, Binary . .)
• What about people/situations that arent just
  opposites, but are oppositional to what we
  normally think or perceive about something?

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Motherhood

• Like Motherhood, for example
• Eva and Plum
• Helene and Rochelle
• Hannah and Sula
• Nel and Helene
• The Deweys . . .

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Bodies Dismemberment, Dependencies, Sexuality

• Evas dismemberment power, not helplessness.
  It gives her control of her life, offers her a
  chance for self-definition, independence, control
  of her own narrative
• Shadrack and Plum, in contrast, lose power over
  their bodies through the traumas they encounter
  in the war
• Hannah and Helenes sexuality How does Morrison
  represent each of them in terms of sexuality? How
  does the opposition work on you?

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Whites/Blacks

• What does the white bargeman think of blacks? (p.
  63)
• What do blacks think of black women who sleep
  with whites? (p. 112)
• Why do black women (Nel, in particular,) want to
  look like white women?
• What kind of work do the black men what to do?
• How does Tar Baby fit in here?
• How is Morrison messing with binary thinking in
  these comparisons?

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Morality/Judgement

• Eva How do you respond to her?
• To her abandonment of her children
• To her loss of a limb
• To her torching of Plum
• Do you admire her stoutheartedness, her ability
  to survive? Or, are you horrified?
• The Deweys
• Do you praise her for taking them in
• Or, do you condemn her for her absent-minded
  treatment of them?
• Is Eva following the folk wisdom that encourages
  a mother to treat all of her children the same?
  Or are the deweys bludgeoned into insipid
  sameness by this folk love and indifference?

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Wednesday Quiz

• 1. Why does Eva burn Plum?
• 2. Whats the second strange thing?
• 3. Why does Eva think Sula just watched Hannah
  burn?
• 4. Why does Jude ask Nel to marry him?
• 5. Why dont the Deweys grow?

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Quiz cont.

• 6. Outsiders think that tenants of the bottom
  are slack and slovenly, but the real reason
  people there just accept bad karma or the
  presence of evil is that they recognize . . .
  What?
• 7. What happens to Eva?
• 8. Jude doesnt read Sulas birthmark as a
  stemmed rose, but rather as a _____________.

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A summary of Aesthetic and Rapport in Toni
Morrisons Sula by Barbara Johnson

• She begins with a catalogue of figures Freud
  associates with the uncanny
• Dismembered limbs, a severed head, a hand cut
  off at the wrists, . . . feet which dance by
  themselves . . . all these have something
  particularly uncanny about them, especially when,
  as in the last instance, they prove able to move
  of themselves in addition. As we already know,
  this kind of uncanniness springs from its
  association with the castration complex. To many
  people, the idea of being buried alive while
  appearing to be dead is the most uncanny thing of
  all. And yet psychoanalysis has taught us that
  this terrifying phantasy is only a transformation
  of another phantasy which had originally nothing
  terrifying about it at all, but was qualified by
  a certain lasciviousness the phantasy, I mean,
  of intra-uterine existence. (244 of The Uncanny)

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Echoes of the uncanny in Sula

• The one-legged grandmother
• Plum, who Eva fears will crawl back into her womb
• Sulas cutting off of her own finger
• Shads experience on the battlefield

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Toni Morrison both displaces and deconstsructs
Freuds notion of the castration complex.

• Loss of bodily intactness is integral to survival
• At least for Eva . . .
• The novel is written under the sign of the newly
  missing Chicken Little
• Castration is recognized as a mechanism of social
  control
• P. 103-104 of Sula
• How does the castration complex work differently
  for black and white men? For white men its an
  unconscious fantasy, for black men, a political
  reality.
• Who suffers from penis envy, according to this
  passage? -- Not just women, but white men, for
  the black penis
• How does Sula challenge the idea of the phallus
  as law, patriarchy? Home, in the novel, is not
  where the phallus is.

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The dissociation of affect and event is one of
Morrisons most striking literary techniques in
this novel. . .

• Best example is Nels reaction to her discovery
  of Sula and Jude on the floor it takes her
  seventy pages to howl with pain. But also,
• Shadracks permanent astonishment and his use
  of suicide day to contain his shock and terror.
• Then, p. 105

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Aesthetic and Rapport?????

• Aesthetic domain of contemplation of forms,
  implying detachment and distance
• Rapport dynamics of connectedness
• The two words, according to Johnson, name an
  opposition, or at least a set of issues, that are
  central in Sula.

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For example . . .

• Why do Sula and Nel just watch the space close up
  after Chicken Little drops into the water? P.
  168, 170
• Hannahs death scene and Sulas (dis) interested
  watching p. 78

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What Eva is accusing both Nel and Sula of here
is a privileging of aesthetics over rapport.

• They watch they are interested . . .
• Interest is the name of a lack of involvement.
• Kant defines the domain of the aesthetic as the
  domain of disinterestedness.
• Whats the difference between interest and
  disinterest? Its almost impossible to tell.
• Freud discusses the aesthetic principle in his
  essay on the uncanny . . .
• The kind of interest Nel and Sula exhibit, is
  uncanny, terrifying, terrorizing.

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Johnsons questions

• The novel raises the question about our own gap
  between affect and event. How do we respond to
  the horrible images, painful truths and
  excruciating losses the novel describes?
• Do we just sit back and watch?
• What is the nature of our pleasure in
  contemplating these traumas?
• What would be a response that would embody
  rapport rather than aesthetics?
• Is this what Morrison is challenging us to
  consider?
• Or, is she merely trying to make us less innocent
  in our contemplation, or analysis, our interest?

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Her answer

• By choosing to aestheticize
• A fathers rape of his daughter
• A mothers murder of her son
• A daughter watching her mother burn
• Morrison makes the aesthetic inextricable from
  trauma, taboo, and violation. . . She represents
  in all its moral ambiguity the problematic
  fascination of transforming horror into pleasure,
  violence into beauty, mourning into nostalgia.

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How does are we, culturally, trained to be
watchers?

• Anybody remember the movie Being There with
  Peter Sellers?
• How often do we act as spectators? Sports? TV?
  (which makes us spectators of war, starvation,
  torture, . . .) Internet? Class?
• What do you think of interpreting the novel in
  this way?

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Friday ThemesSee handout in Word.

• Death, Time and History, Sexuality, Language and
  Meaning, Absence/Presence,