{"id":157069,"date":"2022-02-09T10:24:36","date_gmt":"2022-02-09T15:24:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=157069"},"modified":"2022-02-09T11:24:36","modified_gmt":"2022-02-09T16:24:36","slug":"a-dewlined-web-on-sula","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2022\/02\/09\/a-dewlined-web-on-sula\/","title":{"rendered":"A Dew-Lined Web: On Sula"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

It\u2019s the name. Sula. That\u2019s what always strikes a space between my breasts whenever I think of Toni Morrison\u2019s second novel, published in 1973, and my favorite of her oeuvre. There are other proper names in Morrison\u2019s titles\u2014Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved\u2014but they do not wear their allegory so lightly. Sula always seems to me to name a person<\/i>, not an idea. She is, of course, a type<\/i>, but she is the type of person who exceeds typology. She\u2019s the kind of woman about whom you start to say \u201cshe\u2019s the kind of woman\u2026\u201d even though you know any words that follow will twist like winter leaves before they hit the air, will fall to the ground, dry and dead wrong.<\/p>\n

Sula is a real character<\/i>, as we say. Sula is incomparable, matchless, singular. There is nobody like Sula. And yet. I\u2019ve seen Sula in my days, in my sisters, my aunts, my friends, a stranger crossing the road. Morrison saw Sula in someone, too, before she wrote her:<\/p>\n

I began to write my second book, which was called Sula<\/i>, because of my preoccupation with a picture of a woman and the way in which I heard her name pronounced. Her name was Hannah, and I think she was a friend of my mother\u2019s. I don\u2019t remember seeing her very much, but what I do remember is the color around her\u2014a kind of violet, a suffusion of something violet\u2014and her eyes, which appeared to be half closed. But what I remember most is how the women said her name: how they said \u201cHannah Peace\u201d and smiled to themselves, and there was some secret about her that they knew, which they didn\u2019t talk about, at least not in my hearing, but it seemed loaded in the way in which they said her name. And I suspected that she was a little bit of an outlaw but that they approved in some way. (The Source of Self-Regard<\/i><\/a>, 241)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the novel, this remembered Hannah is Sula\u2019s mother, Hannah Peace, but she is also Sula.<\/p>\n

The paradox of Sula is that she\u2019s quintessentially herself\u2014nobody is like her\u2014but she\u2019s also everybody we know who is like that<\/i>. This paradox takes shape in different ways in Sula<\/i>, in the novel\u2019s preoccupations with ironic oppositions, with how the individual self-relates to the collective, with the dynamic relation between order and disorder. As is Morrison\u2019s tendency, all aspects of the novel\u2014I am drawn in this writing to its names\u2014flow through these interlocking thematic valves, coordinating like an intricate machine or body.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

The novel is named for a character whom we don\u2019t really meet for thirty-odd pages. Sula<\/i> begins instead with a fictional place\u2014Medallion, Ohio\u2014and specifically with \u201cthat part of town where the Negroes lived, the part they called the Bottom in spite of the fact that it was up in the hills.\u201d This paradoxical name comes from \u201ca nigger joke,\u201d the kind told by both white folks and colored folks \u201cwhen they\u2019re looking for a little comfort.\u201d Morrison here sets up the first of many dizzying spins between high places and low, from treetops to holes, from hilltops to mud, from the aeronautical skies to tunnels and trenches. This species of irony\u2014\u201cit was lovely up in the Bottom\u201d\u2014is technically called antiphrasis, but it just means calling something by its opposite, how we sometimes call a hefty man \u201cSlim\u201d or a tall one \u201cTiny.\u201d<\/p>\n

Antiphrasis is at work in the names of several characters in Sula<\/i>. We meet a grown man named BoyBoy. We meet a pale man named Tar Baby. We meet a woman everybody calls Teapot\u2019s Mamma \u201cbecause being his mamma was precisely her major failure.\u201d Late in the novel, we learn that the people of the Bottom have a general \u201cdisregard for name changes by marriage\u201d and mark four gravestones with the surname Peace<\/em>. \u201cTogether they read like a chant,\u201d Morrison writes, a chant as eerie as it is holy, given that none of the dead comes to their end in peace or rests in peace after.<\/p>\n

And then, of course, there are the deweys:<\/p>\n

Eva snatched the caps off their heads and ignored their names. She looked at the first child closely, his wrists, the shape of his head and the temperament that showed in his eyes and said, \u201cWell. Look at Dewey. My my mymymy.\u201d When later that same year she sent for a child who kept falling down off the porch across the street, she said the same thing. Somebody said, \u201cBut Miss Eva, you calls the other one Dewey.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSo? This here\u2019s another one.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Eva bestows the name Dewey upon three boys\u2014whose skin is respectively \u201cdeeply black,\u201d \u201clight-skinned,\u201d and \u201cchocolate\u201d\u2014for a quality she sees in each, as if matching some inner thing to the outer label. But each dewey becomes \u201cin fact as well as in name a dewey\u2014joining with the other two to become a trinity with a plural name \u2026 inseparable, loving nothing and no one but themselves.\u201d The chain gang game they play enacts their concatenation: \u201cWith the shoelaces of each of them tied to the laces of the others, they stumbled and tumbled out of Eva\u2019s room.\u201d The boys stop growing, so they do not become different from each other over time; eventually, not even their mammas can tell the deweys apart.<\/p>\n

Each of these reversals of nominal expectation is but a slight topsy-turvy amid the mellifluous waves of Morrison\u2019s prose. Yet this tic of antiphrasis casts all<\/i> names into doubt. Names are meant to pinpoint a person, fix them as a discrete entity, not entangle them or flip them around. But, as Morrison says of the real-life Hannah Peace, even the way a name is spoken can change it indelibly, like the cover of a song. Sula<\/i> plays with and overturns the usual logic of marking an individual\u2019s uniqueness with a name, the same logic that we see both in Sula\u2019s belief that her best friend, Nel, \u201cwas the first person who had been real to her, whose name she knew,\u201d and in Sula\u2019s horror upon learning that the man she has always known as Ajax is actually Albert Jacks (A. Jacks): \u201cwhen for the first time in her life she had lain in bed with a man and said his name involuntarily or said it truly meaning him, the name she was screaming and saying was not his at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

If you can be named for something you\u2019re not, for somebody other than yourself, are you real<\/i>, are you truly<\/i> yourself? If your name can dissolve and recombine into another name, who are you anyway?<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

This mystery of the self<\/i>, of our shared but unbreachable condition of singularity, twinkles like a string of lights through the novel. The first time young Nel leaves Medallion and meets her grandmother Rochelle\u2014\u201cthis tiny woman with the softness and glare of a canary\u201d\u2014she returns with an epiphany:<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m me,\u201d she whispered. \u201cMe.\u201d Nel didn\u2019t know quite what she meant, but on the other hand she knew exactly what she meant. \u201cI\u2019m me. I\u2019m not their daughter. I\u2019m not Nel. I\u2019m me. Me.\u201d Each time she said the word me<\/i> there was a gathering in her like power, like joy, like fear.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Me<\/i> is a name that only you have and that everybody else does, too; this is the uncanny magic of pronouns.<\/p>\n

Nel is herself<\/i> but late in the novel, she tries to distinguish herself from Sula, only to be reminded: \u201cYou. Sula. What\u2019s the difference?\u201d Because despite their individuality, the two girls are as deeply connected as the deweys and in a manner just as fantastical. Sula and Nel first meet one another in their dreams, each sensing that \u201cwatching the dream along with her, were some smiling sympathetic eyes.\u201d Like Nel\u2019s epiphany of self-regard, this \u201cintense \u2026 sudden\u201d friendship with Sula is both consummately specific and hauntingly familiar.<\/p>\n

When I think of Sula<\/i> and feel that thrum at my breastbone, I\u2019m thinking of the tart green sap of girlhood (\u201cHey, girl,\u201d they say, \u201cgirl, girl, girlgirlgirl\u201d). I\u2019m remembering the \u201cadventuresomeness\u201d of young girl friendship, the \u201cmean determination to explore everything\u201d together, truly everything<\/i>, and the perfection of this sentence: \u201cAnd they had no priorities.\u201d I\u2019m conjuring the teetering into fleshly doings that happens at a certain age when, suddenly, like a flock of birds erupting into flight, all of the boys are beautiful: \u201cIt was in that summer, the summer of their twelfth year, the summer of the beautiful black boys, that they became skittish, frightened and bold.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019m feeling this trembling time, its desire and ache, \u201ctheir small breasts just now beginning to create some pleasant discomfort,\u201d this girlish queerness\u2014neither straight nor lesbian exactly, but feverish with slant possibility\u2014this dewy conspiracy of selves:<\/p>\n

Together they worked until the two holes were one and the same. When the depression was the size of a small dishpan, Nel\u2019s twig broke. With a gesture of disgust she threw the pieces into the hole they had made. Sula threw hers in too. Nel saw a bottle cap and tossed it in as well. Each then looked around for more debris to throw into the hole: paper, bits of glass, butts of cigarettes, until all of the small defiling things they could find were collected there. Carefully they replaced the soil and covered the entire grave with uprooted grass.<\/p>\n

Neither one had spoken a word.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Again, what strikes me is the scene\u2019s combination of strangeness and familiarity: the weird games children play when they are outside and have no toys; the sense that as a young girl, I, too, played this way with, became one with, other young girls (whose names I know: Hilda, Chanda, Nyaka). Even the smallest details of the scene\u2014the literal bits and pieces Sula and Nel throw in their merged hole\u2014shudder between the random and the archetypal.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

This suits the novel\u2019s interest in waste: every other page refers to shit, piss, butts, asses, stool, outhouses, restrooms, bladders, or constipation. (The Bottom is a triple pun at least). The girls\u2019 burial of \u201csmall defiling things\u201d comes after two other episodes of oblique abjection, one familial, one erotic. In the first, Sula overhears her mother speaking dismissively about her and feels radically severed from home, cast out like slops. In the second, Sula and Nel run a gauntlet of male gazes (\u201cpig meat,\u201d Ajax calls after them), secretly thrilled by what lies curled behind the seams of the men\u2019s trousers. The hole-digging scene in turn foreshadows later sexual entanglements and gruesome deaths, some requiring a closed casket.<\/p>\n

The scene itself climaxes in a beautiful and horrifying death\u2014horrifying because it is beautiful\u2014that both binds the two girls together and, when she tries to ensure that he has not witnessed it, binds young Sula to Shadrack for life. In this novel, the abject\u2014filth and mess, all that is beyond the bounds, the realm of the \u201cjettisoned \u2026 where meaning collapses\u201d\u2014is, oddly enough, a binding agent (Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror<\/i><\/a>, 2). This symbiosis of order and disorder appears throughout Sula<\/i>\u2014Nel lives in \u201cthe high silence of her mother\u2019s incredibly orderly house, feeling the neatness pointing at her back,\u201d while Sula is \u201cwedged into a household of throbbing disorder constantly awry\u201d\u2014but especially in Shadrack\u2019s story, which itself sits on the outer edges of the novel.<\/p>\n

Shadrack\u2019s name points us to the Book of Daniel, where King Nebuchadnezzar II throws three men, one named Shadrach, into a furnace for refusing to bow to the king\u2019s image. This biblical tale echoes the immolation of Sula\u2019s uncle and mother in the novel, as well as the hellhole Shadrack finds himself in during World War I: \u201che turned his head a little to the right and saw the face of a soldier near him fly off.\u201d Shadrack\u2019s trauma as a veteran makes him unravel. His fingers seem \u201cto grow in higgledy-piggledy fashion like Jack\u2019s beanstalk\u201d and to join up with his shoelaces: \u201cThe four fingers of each hand fused into the fabric, knotted themselves and zigzagged in and out of the tiny eyeholes.\u201d<\/p>\n

But he\u2019s soothed by the \u201cneat balance\u201d of a food tray separating rice, tomatoes, and meat: \u201cAll their repugnance was contained.\u201d And so, when he returns to Medallion, he invents National Suicide Day \u201cto order and focus experience,\u201d to make \u201ca place for fear as a way of controlling it\u201d; \u201cif one day a year were devoted to it, everybody could get it out of the way and the rest of the year would be safe and free.\u201d His shack on a riverbank on the outskirts of town is a spatial version of National Suicide Day, a place of containment beside a muddy slurry.<\/p>\n

When young Sula walks into his home that fateful day to see about a death, she\u2019s struck by how clean and neat it is, despite housing such a chaotic mind. The relationship between girl and man is thin and taut, brief yet consequential. Their conversation revolves around one word\u2014\u201cAlways\u201d\u2014that holds radically different meanings for each. This eventful, contingent day brings Shadrack a shred of humanness to hold onto; the child\u2019s belt that Sula drops becomes \u201cthe one piece of evidence that he once had a visitor.\u201d And this day also serves as the crucible that forges that unaccountable being: Sula, the woman.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Who\u2014or what<\/i>\u2014does Sula become? Sula the woman is beautiful and loose; she works little and discards people; she sleeps around with the men in town and catches feelings for one. On one hand, Sula is completely understandable, the natural outgrowth of her mother and grandmother, who are cruel to women but adore men. On the other hand, Sula is utterly alien. When she\u2019s caught with another woman\u2019s husband, they\u2019re on their hands and knees licking each other\u2019s lips like dogs, neither of them notably aroused. When Sula does fall in love, she imagines her paramour\u2019s body in this unsettling way: \u201cSkin black. Very black. So black that only a steady careful rubbing with steel wool would remove it, and as it was removed there was the glint of gold leaf and under the gold leaf the cold alabaster and deep, deep down under the cold alabaster more black only this time the black of warm loam.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sula is \u201clike any artist with no art form \u2026 dangerous.\u201d Her material is life\u2014\u201chers was an experimental life\u201d\u2014and she creates two major works of art, the Bottom and her own self: \u201cI don\u2019t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.\u201d In each case, she creates via negation, by rubbing herself off, carving herself out: \u201cShe had no center, no speck around which to grow \u2026 She was completely free of ambition, with no affection for money, property or things, no greed, no desire to command attention or compliments\u2014no ego.\u201d This emptiness is crucial to her art but it is also threatening. It makes Sula extra<\/i> in every sense: too much, a \u201cwayward stranger,\u201d a \u201cpariah.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet Sula is necessary, essential to the black people of Medallion. This is because they have a precise understanding of evil, one that is akin to Shadrack making a place for fear rather than trying to dispel it:<\/p>\n

Their conviction of Sula\u2019s evil changed them in accountable yet mysterious ways. Once the source of their personal misfortune was identified, they had leave to protect and love one another. They began to cherish their husbands and wives, protect their children, repair their homes and in general band together against the devil in their midst. In their world, aberrations were as much a part of nature as grace. It was not for them to expel or annihilate it. They would no more run Sula out of town than they would kill the robins that brought her back\u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sula\u2019s evil makes the good rise in others; her bad brings out their best; her wrongs make them right.<\/p>\n

While some critics interpret the birthmark over Sula\u2019s eye as the biblical mark of Cain, the divergent and quotidian readings of the birthmark in the novel itself (other characters see it as a rose, a snake, ashes, a tadpole) suggest not just spiritual symbolism, but also worldly, deeply human ambiguity. Each person sees the particular evil in her that they need to. The community doesn\u2019t cast Sula out or set out to sacrifice her; everybody knows deep down that her magnificent, maleficent presence is what unites them. Sula isn\u2019t in fact a scapegoat but a supplement, the allegedly \u201cunnatural\u201d extraneous piece that turns out to be missing from the center. (Jacques Derrida writes in Speech and Phenomena<\/em>: \u201cWe can speak \u2026 of a primordial \u2018supplement\u2019: their addition<\/i> comes to make up for<\/i> a deficiency, it comes to compensate for a primordial nonself-presence.\u201d)<\/p>\n

When Sula\u2019s gone, everybody misses her; they miss hating her and measuring themselves against her. When Sula\u2019s gone, everything collapses.<\/p>\n

Who, and what, she is therefore isn\u2019t merely a question of personality. It\u2019s a question of philosophy: \u201cThat\u2019s how philosophy started \u2026 One of the first questions one could pose \u2026 is the question of the difference between the who and the what \u2026 Do I love someone for the absolute singularity of who they are? I love you because you are you. Or do I love your qualities? \u2026 The history of love, the heart of love, is divided between the who and what.\u201d (Derrida, in Derrida<\/i><\/a>, by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman).<\/p>\n

If what Sula is to us is an emblem, a mirror, a type, a supplement of the community\u2014and she is all of these things\u2014we must always remember that who Sula is belongs, in the end, to her friend. \u201cWe was girls together,\u201d Nel cries and it strikes me in my chest like the point of a pin hitting a gong.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Sula is<\/i> Nel. Sula is Rochelle, Nel\u2019s grandmother, who also wears yellow and brings birds. Sula is her mother, Hannah, who also fucks all the men in the Bottom. Sula is her grandmother, Eva, who also kills a boy. Sula is Shadrack, another outcast whose hellfire teems at the edges of the community, sealing it whole. And Sula is herself, Sula Mae Peace, as well as every possible unraveling of that triple rippling name, which only on this latest rereading did I think to look into.<\/p>\n

As with many of Morrison\u2019s names, Sula Mae is biblical. Sula Mae is Shulamit or Shulamite, the name of Solomon\u2019s beloved in the Song of Songs, the woman whose \u201clips drop sweetness as the honeycomb.\u201d Sula Mae could also be Salome\u2014either the temptress who danced for King Herod and demanded the head of John the Baptist at the behest of her fiery mother, or a female disciple who witnessed Christ\u2019s crucifixion. Both the names Shulamit and Salome come from the root word shalom<\/i>, or peace<\/i>. So, Sula Mae Peace is Peace Peace, a doubling that seems to jar her loose from herself, and makes us wonder whether she is one of the peaces in that graveyard, or all of them. And Sula spelled backward\u2014is it \u201call us\u201d or \u201calas\u201d or \u201ca lass\u201d or \u201ca loss?\u201d<\/p>\n

Sula is all of these possibilities, every line of light on a dew-lined web. But no matter how many times I reread Sula<\/i>, analyze her names, untangle her threads, the light of her slips through my fingers. Some small thing that lives in my chest and has a bell for a tongue knows the truth of the matter: Sula is Sula<\/i>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

From Namwali Serpell\u2019s introduction to the new reissue of <\/em>Sula, published by Vintage Classics.<\/em><\/p>\n

Namwali Serpell is a professor of English at Harvard University and the author of\u00a0<\/em>Seven Modes of Uncertainty\u00a0(2014),\u00a0<\/em>The Old Drift\u00a0(2019), <\/em>Stranger Faces\u00a0(2020), and <\/em>The Furrows (September 2022).<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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