Sula

1. Sula

2. Quiz • 1. Why does Shadrack start National Suicide Day? (X-tra credit – When is the first National Suicide Day celebrated?) • 2. What occasion prompts Nel’s one and only trip outside of Medallion? • 3. Who is it who only “wanted a place to die privately but not quite alone? • 4. What’s the difference in the way Hannah and Eva “handle” men? • 5. So, what’s Plum’s 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?

3. 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?

4. 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?

5. 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 aren’t just opposites, but are oppositional to what we normally think or perceive about something?

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

7. Bodies – Dismemberment, Dependencies, Sexuality • Eva’s 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 trauma’s they encounter in the war • Hannah and Helene’s sexuality – How does Morrison represent each of them in terms of sexuality? How does the opposition work on you?

8. 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?

9. 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?

10. Wednesday Quiz • 1. Why does Eva burn Plum? • 2. What’s 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 don’t the Dewey’s grow?

11. 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 doesn’t “read” Sula’s birthmark as a stemmed rose, but rather as a _____________.

12. A summary of “’Aesthetic’ and ‘Rapport’ in Toni Morrison’s 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)

13. Echoes of the uncanny in Sula • The one-legged grandmother • Plum, who Eva fears will crawl back into her womb • Sula’s cutting off of her own finger • Shad’s experience on the battlefield

14. “Toni Morrison both displaces and deconstsructs Freud’s 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 it’s 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.

15. “The dissociation of affect and event is one of Morrison’s most striking literary techniques in this novel. . .” • Best example is Nel’s reaction to her discovery of Sula and Jude on the floor – it takes her seventy pages to howl with pain. But also, • Shadrack’s permanent astonishment and his “use” of suicide day to contain his shock and terror. • Then, p. 105

16. 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.”

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

18. “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. • What’s the difference between interest and disinterest? It’s 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.

19. Johnson’s 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”?

20. Her answer: • By choosing to aestheticize • A father’s rape of his daughter • A mother’s 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.

21. 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?

22. Friday – ThemesSee handout in Word. • Death, Time and History, Sexuality, Language and Meaning, Absence/Presence,