Text and Context in the Art of Toni Morrison (cont)

By the continuous use of the word “holy” with reference to Suggs, her actions and the action unfolding in the story, is raised to a level of the deepest significance. Similarly, Suggs’ use of “O my people.”¹⁵while referring to the ex-black slaves, reveals not only a primal acoustical significance, but communicates the sense of an epic event. In an interview with Judith Wilson, Morrison comments that her style is “…very biblical and meandering and aural—you really have to hear it.”¹⁶ This is also how Morrison achieves “intimacy”¹⁷in the novels where the reader is drawn into the action in a participatory manner.

The story as “talk cure” facilitating healing for those scarred by personal and collective experience is best affected through the primal agency of orality, or speech. Thus, the origination of the term “talk cure’ in psychoanalysis, where through “return”¹⁸ to the repressed past, scarred and fragmented aspects of the self are claimed and conjoined, through the basic process of “harmony”¹⁹ embedded in sound experience. Since repetition and recall embedded in oral narration, create a “hearing dominant mode,”²⁰where the interiority of both speaker and listener is accessed, they help to reconnect with repressed and buried aspects of the self, which ultimately lead to healing. Thus the narrator’s constant use of the words “crawling already?”²¹ in Beloved, to describe the child Sethe murdered, allows the text to resurrect the ghost, and by an obsessive and constant “return” to it, allows the text, the narration and the character Sethe, to come out of the thrall that the past had clamped on both the narration and the character, Sethe. It is only through oral utterance of her story that Sethe is finally able to “lay. ..down…Sword and shield” ²²the “mess”²³of her life. A term coined for those texts that have a strong oral dimension is the term “speakerly,”²⁴ used by Henry Louis Gates in The Signifying Monkey to indicate those texts that resound with the speaking voice like Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. This aesthetic strategy could also be viewed as a revisionary strategy by black women writers to fashion and recast their writing traditions along lines of difference vis a vis dominant scripted traditions, both black and white.