"Families make the best enemies": Paradoxes of Narcissistic Identification in Toni Morrison's Love.

Mellard, James Milton

There are many significant features in the underappreciated Love (2003), Toni Morrison's eighth novel. (1) A feature that both connects it to, and distinguishes it from, each of her previous novels (a ninth, A Mercy, was published in November 2008) is its particular expression of the psychological phenomenon of identification. Conceptually, identification seems relatively uncomplicated in its basic Freudian premise. As one technical dictionary puts it, it is the "psychological process whereby the subject assimilates an aspect, property or attribute of the other and is transformed, wholly or partially, after the model the other provides." The first such other, model, or "object," is the mother, and in typical psychological development, new ones will follow. Thus, "[i]t is by means of a series of identifications that the personality is constituted and specified" (Laplanche and Pontalis 205). But in clinical theory and practice, as well as in the literary criticism they foster, identification is a complex and essentially contested concept generating competing viewpoints. Representing "two [main] lines of descent," the two come primarily, as Jean Wyatt suggests in Risking Difference, "from Freud's two major paradigms of identification" (9). The paradigms are descended from the dual myths, the Oedipus and the Narcissus, that in "The Neurotic's Individual Myth" Jacques Lacan posits as the basic ones operating in the construction and functioning of subjectivity.

It is here where a reading of Toni Morrison's novel through the theoretical lens of the sometimes controversial Slavoj Zizek becomes pivotal in understanding the intricacies of the concept of identification. For in Love, in the relation between two young girls who grow into a conflictual adulthood and who, despite age and social change and change of fortune and outbreaks of destructive violence, never outgrow their attachment to each other, Morrison constructs not the more common oedipal but what must be regarded as a narcissistic identification whose paradoxical expressions readily, if complexly, avail themselves to analysis through Zizek's mediation of Freudian and Lacanian ideas. Thus, I shall turn predominantly though not exclusively to Zikek, a prolific social, political, and psychoanalytic theorist whose integration of Freud and Lacan has been so influential. (2) While there surely are other essays on the richly rewarding Love one could write on oedipalization, and fathers, I eventually shall focus upon narcissistic identification, with its emphasis on maternal relations.

First, however, because of the reservations many African Americanists harbor regarding psychoanalytic theory vis-a-vis African American identity, culture, or cultural expressions (including literature), there are two major issues to which I must attend that complicate the stakes in any application of psychoanalysis, whether Freudian or otherwise, to the development of black subjectivity in America. The more general one is whether tradition--meaning Freudian or neo-Freudian--psychoanalysis even applies. (3) Among scholars and critics addressing African American literature, reservations are such that in her Psychoanalysis and Black Novels Claudia Tate suggests that many feel there is something illicit in using the approach. To do so constitutes, Tate wittily notes, a sort of " 'roll in the hay' with Freud and company" (5). Of such applications, the main critiques are cultural and historical. That is, given that Freud extrapolated his theory of the unconscious and its relation to constitution and functioning of subjectivity at a particular historical moment (the late nineteenth and early twentieth century), within a specific (western European) culture, and amid the ideological domination of the patriarchal nuclear family, we may reasonably ask whether oedipal determinations of gender and identity can be assumed as universal or if not universal can be--even with modification--made applicable to subjects from cultural or racial backgrounds different from that of the discipline's founder. (4) Obviously, Tate's book which as the author rightly contends uses psychoanalysis to "tell us much about the complicated social workings of race in the United States and the representations of these workings in the literature of African Americans" (5)--is itself a practical response to such African Americanist misgivings.

But to features of psychoanalysis and of identification in particular there are theoretical responses as well. As I suggested above, Freudian theory posits that identification revolves around one or the other of the two "myths" or formations constitutive of identity, the Oedipus complex and the issues surrounding narcissism that will become my eventual focus. Identification with (or in Louis Althusser's famous concept, "interpellation" by) a culture, the Symbolic "law" of a culture, often involves the Oedipus complex even if, as Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks starkly dramatizes, in a conflictual way. Addressing one specific theoretical reservation among African Americanists regarding Freud's thought, Gwen Bergner, in an essay on Frederick Douglass, admits that in using the Oedipus complex in analysis of "Douglass's Narrative, [she must] necessarily enter debates about the complex's universality and its relevance for African-American culture in particular" (245). But arguing against the usual reservations that standard psychoanalytic models "inadequately explain the relevance of race for subjectivity" (244), Bergner points out that in the 1990s the anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere had been able to respond to the denial of the broad applicability of the Oedipus complex found in the 1920s in the claims of Bronislaw Malinowski (see his Sex and Repression in Savage Society). Against Malinowski's rejection of an oedipal understanding of the formation of human subjectivity, Obeyesekere, Bergner writes, "used cross-cultural variations in kinship structures to expand conceptions of the Oedipus complex. Without limiting the oedipal drama to Western, nuclear families, Obeyesekere argues that various configurations of kin members do determine the child's erotic and aggressive objects" (245; original emphasis) Indeed, citing the 1960s benchmark assessment by Anne Parsons, Bergner argues that those varied "kinship structures [ultimately] comprise an Oedipus complex by inserting the child into its social order. In this respect," Bergner concludes, "the Oedipus complex, while varying across cultures according to different models of kinship, is nonetheless constitutive of different formations of subjectivity" (245). The conclusion is that because these matters are structural rather than contingently historical, the Oedipus complex, by any name with which we might label it, is for all analytic purposes, universal. That is, in the terms of one Lacanian whom Bergner (246) notes, it is a "symbolic constellation underlying the unconscious of the subject" (Felman 103)--any subject whatever.

Problematic and pervasive, colonial history--to which in her work on identification Diana Fuss draws our attention--gives us the foundational concept W. E. B. Du Bois identified as "double consciousness." In Souls of Black Folk, as Bergner reminds us, Du Bois stresses how African Americans must live with a "sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others." The doubling comes in being "an American, [and] a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body" (5). Indeed, in African American literature, as Bergner points out, "works of fiction and autobiography frequently represent the subject's acquisition of double consciousness as a singular event; characters 'discover' racial identity in dramatic scenes involving photographs, mirrors, or acts of witnessing." The upshot of such scenes, she suggests, is that "the self is simultaneously defamiliarized and reconstituted within the cultural discourse of race" (241). Because the discourse of race is governed by the dominant white cultural symbolic order, Du Bois's concept essentially pertains to the Oedipus complex, to identification derived from interpellation within a Symbolic social identity as black. In African American literature, such oedipalized scenes are undeniably important, archewpal. But is this the only such scene of identification available to black subjects? What of other scenes that do not directly address a "discourse of race"? Given the massive amount of scholarship and criticism regarding race, identity, and double consciousness, is it possible for an African American writer to deal with "identification" apart from race, to do so while neither ignoring its social effects nor writing as if it does not exist, but merely asserting that a black American subjectivity, in all its inevitable contradictions and paradoxes, may be constituted without one's going through a scene such as that marking Douglass or Du Bois or Richard Wright or Ellison's Invisible Man?

In Love, as if to address such questions and more, it is the second myth of psychoanalysis, that of Narcissus, on which Toni Morrison focuses. There, when Morrison constructs a scenario of narcissistic rather than oedipal identification, she draws our attention to just how important has been this motif in her novels and the extent to which such identification may be a displacement of, if not an escape from, the invidious power of double consciousness entailed by oedipal identifications. Ultimately and emphatically, Morrison makes us aware in Love that from her first novel to this latest one she effects a series of almost combinatorial changes upon the motif of narcissistic identification. In The Bluest Eye, perhaps Morrison's most tragic (because most racialized) expression of it, the motif involves the child Pecola's identification with a cinematic figure of iconic whiteness found in Shirley Temple and a subsequent dissociation of personality largely as a result. In Sula, the motif, also tragic in its own nonracial way, involves identification between two black girls, Nel and Sula, who part ways over a man. In Song of Solomon, it involves Milkman and Guitar, two young black men whose relationship disintegrates tragically because of disagreement about racial identity rather than racial antagonism. In Tar Baby, Morrison cross-genders the motif, but it is again star-crossed because lovers Son and Jadine both find and lose, in each other identificatory others through differences regarding their relations to dominant white culture. Narcissistic identification in Beloved breaches the demarcation between natural and supernatural subjects, as the flesh-and- blood Denver also finds and inevitably loses her identificatory other in the spectral ghost of her sister, Beloved. (5) In Jazz the potentially tragic motif once again involves another form of spectral otherness, one formed by Violet Trace's psychological dissociation, a nearly psychotic identification with an "other" self from which she ultimately escapes. The motif in Paradise once again invokes a discordance between material and immaterial, as readers find anachronistically in characters such as Gigi and Consolata a sort of textual identification that crosses a temporal barrier of some twenty years. But in the novel there are as well other, more ordinary forms of identification in which the women living (and slaughtered) at the Convent all find identification with an "other" or a "mother" from among the outcasts and disenchanted locating shelter there.

Most recently, Love expands abundantly on aspects of the motif foreshadowed in Sula and in the enmity that develops in Song of Solomon between Milkman and Guitar. In the intense, reciprocal, and potentially tragic identification begun in childhood between Christine Cosey and Heed Johnson Cosey, Love compels readers finally to perceive that narcissistic identification not only has long been one of Toni Morrison's most persistent preoccupations but also suggests just how abiding is the novelist's interest in exploring psychoanalytic perspectives often eschewed in discussions of African American literature. Although a novel of just barely 200 pages, Love recounts a history of a family and a community so complex that it might be dubbed "Gothic soap opera."

Morrison's intricate plot is initiated when a stranger shows up in the town of Silk, asking directions to a place that turns out to belong to Heed Cosey. The stranger, a girl of eighteen or so who calls herself Junior Viviane, revitalizes a decades-old conflict between Heed (Mrs. Bill) Cosey and Christine Cosey. Heed and Christine, daughter of May and Billy Boy Cosey and granddaughter of Bill Cosey, had been best friends as children but were made implacable enemies when Bill Cosey chose Heed as his second wife (his first, Julia, Billy Boy's mother, dies young in 1923 when her son is just twelve). Having married May, a "poor, hungry preacher's child" (96),

Billy Boy himself dies at twenty-four in 1935. Widowed, May largely ignores Christine in favor of managing the family's hotel-resort business. With a father lost and an increasingly distant mother, Christine struggles to find herself, but seems at about seven or eight to discover her salvation in Heed Johnson, whom she encounters on a beach near the resort. Between his son's death in 1935 and marriage to Heed in 1942, Bill Cosey, who owns the resort, leaves much of the running of it to May and others. When Cosey marries Heed, he drives a wedge between her and Christine. While the marriage removes Christine from her presumptive place in her grandfather's affections, it also threatens hers and her mother May's financial security. More than the deaths of Julia and Billy Boy, it is this marriage that transforms Bill Cosey's household into the ultimately dysfunctional extended family. Disrupting the intense narcissistic identification formed between Heed and Christine, the marriage reveals among other things much about Cosey, the community's most admired leader and businessman. Though not the whole story, the novel's pivotal issue is that at his second marriage in 1942 Cosey is fifty-two years old and the bride, Heed Johnson, all of eleven. His granddaughter Christine, at twelve, is eight months older than her best friend, who has now become her new grandmother. Neither child has yet reached puberty.

As Wyatt's Risking Difference amply suggests, while there are other ways to examine identification, I shall look at Love and love's contradictions mainly through the Freudian/Lacanian perspective of Slavoj Zizek. Among cultural critics and psychoanalytic thinkers today, Zizek is unquestionably the most important. Indeed, there is a view that the Slovenian scholar, in his "philosophy of paradox," has established himself as the "beyond" of Lacan (Mellard, passim). Of love, writes Zizek, the paradox "is that it is a free choice, but a choice which never arrives in the present--it is always already made. At a certain moment," he writes in The Sublime Object of Ideology, "I can only state retroactively that I've already chosen" (166). In the novel Love, the most vivid illustration of such a relationship is not that between lovers (such as teenagers Junior and Romen or adults such as Bill Cosey, who loves the prostitute Celestial but is married to Heed Cosey, or Heed, who has an affair with and almost a child by a man named Knox Sinclair) and certainly not that between husbands and wives (Heed and Cosey, Vida and Sandler Gibbons, or May and Billy Boy Cosey). Rather, it is one that develops between two children--the girls Heed Johnson and Christine Cosey. As love always is, theirs is driven by what in psychoanalytic theory, Freudian and Lacanian, is understood as "identification" or "narcissistic identification." Heed and Christine experience their identificatory moment when they are quite young, the one about seven, the other perhaps eight. As is typical, it occurs at a time in their lives when both feel threats in different ways of loss or rejection from the side of the Other. In Christine's case, rejection comes from the mother. In Heed's it is rejection by both family and society. She is offspring of an ostracized Johnson clan, members of a lower-caste community of impoverished thieves, con artists, and fish-cannery workers in a hamlet called Up Beach. How bad are they? In adulthood, Heed recalls that amidst her people she is so alien, so "alone," that living with them is like living with "fire ants for family," with people who "swarm and bite for blood" (127).

Heed eventually escapes her family through marriage, but more immediately she manages a psychological escape through narcissistic identification with Christine. We might say, as is often said of initial meetings of protagonists in romantic film comedies, that the two "meet cute," on a beach that itself symbolizes a social divide between the two girls. Up Beach is "mud," "sugar" is the beach at Sooker Bay, its very name--"Sooker" being a word descended from "sucra"--signifying the substance. Says L, a surrogate mother to Christine, "Our shore is like sugar, which is what the Spaniards thought of when they first saw it" (8). That the children's meeting has the power of myth or fantasy--of once-upon-a-time fable--is plain both in how Morrison describes it and the fact that in its essence it is represented three different times in the text (78, 95, 199). It is presented as if it were a child's story recounted in a nursery tale about how 'T' came to be "me." "Once," Morrison writes, taking Heed's perspective, a little girl wandered too far--down to big water and along its edge where waves skidded and mud turned into clean sand. Ocean spray dampened the man's undershirt she wore. There on a red blanket another little girl with white ribbons in her hair sat eating ice cream. The water was very blue. Beyond, a crowd of people laughed. "Hi, want some?" asked the girl, holding out a spoon. (78)

Blue water, clean sand, ocean spray, red blanket, white ribbons, people laughing on a beach, and a girl her own age offering to share her ice cream with her: together, all this represents a child's fantasy of happiness, the magical place within which, 'T' am instantaneously recognized--in Althusser's term, "interpellated," called into existence--as "me."

In "real" life, such a fable will assuredly have come from meconnaissance, a misunderstanding, a radical misremembering, but psychological, not factual truth is the issue. What emerges in this Golden-Book moment is the truth of an identity found in a narcissistic identification with an other always-already awaiting one. Offering love at first sight, the encounter introduces the children to the paradoxes of love and identity. In such an identificatory relation, the "self" I find in the other is paradoxically a self that is always already within me. In Lacanian terms, the other--Christine--signifies an identity presupposed and so becomes Heed's signifier to herself of herself. In Lacan, this signifier functions within his theory of the cognitive registers, particularly the two called Imaginary and Symbolic. As Zizek tells us, using the terms "constituted" and "constitutive," "the relation between imaginary and symbolic identification," between ideal ego and ego ideal, occurs "between 'constituted' and 'constitutive' identification." In Imaginary or constituted identification, we might say, the difference lies between what, "constituted" from my side, I wish to be versus what I wish to be, but now regarded from the side of the "constitutive" Other. In Heed's fable, the Imaginary/constitutive identification with Christine represents what Heed wishes to be--the girl with the white ribbons, ice cream, and all the rest--and if it comes, the Symbolic/constituted identification will involve Heed's being seen as having "it"--the whole shooting match implicit in her fable.

But we may also put these complex, paradoxical phenomena in another way, as a matter of an image (the Imaginary "other") and the place (the Symbolic "Other") from which that image is seen. That is, in narcissistic identification, I see myself, and making us mindful of Du Bois's double consciousness, I see myself being seen. (6) As Zizek says, in an effort to "put it simply," "imaginary identification is identification with the image in which we appear likeable to ourselves, with the image representing 'what we would like to be,' and symbolic identification, identification with the very place from where ... we look at ourselves so that we appear to ourselves likeable, worthy of love" (105; original emphasis). In Christine, Heed sees herself (in her "other") and sees herself being seen (by her "Other"). In her "other," Heed "finds" both her Imaginary image and those traits, features, or elements associated with the Symbolic, the larger social order of wealth, power, and privilege that connote her being loved and that in herself she must therefore already "have"--indeed, having found them in the "other," presumes always already to possess them in herself. Because Heed's family is very poor, at the lowest level of her fantasy scenario the object from the Symbolic may simply be any of several attached to Christine that signify a Heed "not" poor. Pick one: beach, clean sand, ribbons, ice cream, the privileging spoon, perhaps regarded even by that child as "silver." Whatever is seized upon, the Gestalt of the image, in its identificatory fullness, is one sufficient to enable Heed to find the self (ideally combining "other" and "Other") imagined in her fantasy.

If the psychical process involving image is complex and paradoxical, even more so perhaps is the matter of the place from which Heed sees herself being seen. Because Heed is treated like fecal refuse by a larger social order, the place in her scenario includes a representation of that (Symbolic) social order and a mother- -Christine's--who presumably exercises a maternal relation to her child that Heed does not experience within her own family. Because parental neglect and abuse impinge on Heed's fantasy, then, her presupposed image of herself is a bit more complicated than spoon or ice cream or ribbons might suggest. It must also include her own already self-perceived unworthiness. Since for "as long as she could remember, Heed believed stomachs turned in her company" (79), she must, paradoxically, also find that unworthiness reflected back to her. Part of her truth is that Heed can't respect an Other that unreservedly likes her. Thus her scenario incorporates a contradictory push-pull, the pull of identification with a doubling other in whom she appears "likeable" to herself and thus as what she "would like to be," and the push away from the place of the social-Symbolic Other that is on the side of the "constitutive," from which by the Other she is constituted as unworthy. In her fantasy scene on the beach where the sand of Sooker Bay and the mud of Up Beach come together, she gets both pull and push, a double of her own age who makes her feel like a Cinderella and a mother who functions as Cinderella's cruel stepmother. In that place, on the beach, the two girls get to eat "ice cream with peaches in it," but only "until a smiling woman came and said, 'Go away now. This is private.' "Trudging, in the mud, back to Up Beach, she then hears "the ice cream girl call, 'Wait! Wait!' " Now, even in the face of rejection by the Other/Mother, she has an identificatory other who likes and accepts her nonetheless. "The one who has said 'Go away' smiled even more and the ice cream girl was her friend" (78). For a poor child who, as it were, lives on the wrong side of the tracks and is soon to be literally sold by her parents to Bill Cosey, life never offers a moment better than this one. That is why it becomes the source of both her sweetest pleasure and of her bitterest pain.

What about Christine? In the conditions of existence of that poor, bedraggled young girl her parents named Heed the Night, what possibly could there be with which Christine could identify? What does rich little Christine presuppose as already in herself that she could presume to find in her impoverished counterpart? As for Heed the rejection by the social Other is as much the issue as acceptance, so also for Christine is it oddly, paradoxically, the same. In Heed, a waif trudging a muddy beach in a man's undershirt, Christine finds an other who demands rejection. But it is precisely such a symbol of rejection that Christine's fantasy requires. Why? Christine wants in Heed that which her mother already does not want. We see that element of antithesis mirrored in a further detail of Heed's scenario. In the "Go away" and "Wait" of mother and daughter, May and Christine, Heed becomes the very object focusing Christine's difference from her mother. Christine needs to find manifested in Heed distance or separation not from her mother but from rejection by her mother. By taking Heed into herself, Christine incorporates precisely that which her mother rejects. Long before her mother becomes "crazy May" (79), a woman who fears poverty, social unrest, and threats to society's stability by blacks whose struggle for civil rights she fears will undermine the cozy world created by bourgeois black businessmen such as Bill Cosey, her father-in-law and Christine's paternal grandfather, long before she becomes demonstrably psychotic, May seems already to have cast Christine aside. Although Heed, in her uninformed assessment of Christine's mother, assumes otherwise, May's strongest attachments seem not maternal ones to her child but sexual ones to men and social responsibility. She had been, we are told, a "sweet-tempered daughter of a preacher," "bred to hard work and duty" (103). In a marriage elevating May from poverty into wealth, Billy Boy Cosey chooses her because she seems unlikely to disrupt his life and, as another character puts it, she "also showed signs of understanding what superior men require. If I was a servant in that place," this observer says, "May was a slave. Her whole life was making sure those Cosey men had what they wanted. The father more than the son; the father more than her own daughter" (102). In such a scenario then, it is her revenge against her mother that Christine finds in Heed.

Put there by Christine, the bone in May's throat thus becomes Heed. Heed is the paradoxical object of the rejection that Christine wills to overcome by incorporating it. This is the phenomenon we have seen already in Heed, for in a well-known Lacanian phrase, the very abjection Heed embodies for Christine is the signifier that represents her as subject "for another signifier." For Christine, the mother's rejection in Zizek's terms assumes in Heed a "concrete, recognizable shape" (104). But is this love? Can the narcissistic identification experienced by Heed and Christine be called love? It is certainly called "love" in the novel. Morrison's surrogate narrative voice often seems to be the woman called only L--the single letter serving as a name seems a metonym of "love"--and L says that what the two girls experience is indeed love. (7) L calls their feelings for each other "a passion," one that most people feel neither so early nor so strongly. "If so, they remember it with a smile, dismiss it as a crush that shriveled in time and on time. It's hard to think of it any other way when real life shows up with its list of other people, its swarm of other thoughts." But for the most part, adults do not experience such a moment of falling "for one another. On the spot, without introduction. Grown-ups don't pay it much attention because they can't imagine anything more majestic to a child than their own selves, and so confuse dependence with reverence." In such a passion, the role of parents "is secondary to a child's first chosen love. If such children find each other before they know their own sex, or which one of them is starving, which well fed; before they know color from no color, kin from stranger, then they have found a mix of surrender and mutiny they can never live without. Heed and Christine found such a one" (199). In the complexity of L's assessment, "in its dimension of fundamental deception," it is indeed love "as articulated in Lacanian theory." It is in love's deception that "we try to fill out the unbearable gap of 'Che vuoi?'" What does the other want of me? To fill the gap, "the opening of the Other's desire," Zizek says, we offer "ourselves to the Other as the object of its desire" (116). Precisely in those paradoxical ways do Heed and Christine fill those gaps in the other, Heed as negation, Christine as positivization. That is, when Heed offers herself to Christine as the answer to the question "What does the Other--what do you--want from me?" that answer, for Christine, is itself abjection or rejection--a lack--that will cover over her own lack. Conversely, when Christine offers herself as answer to Heed's identical question, Christine, for Heed, is an object made positive by worthiness found in the reciprocity of identification. Both love and identification are mirrorings that repeat at some level the lesson of the Lacanian mirror stage. In the mirror stage, the other provides the subject an image of magical power and wholeness. It is one that persists, for instance, in the imagery of love songs, such as The first time ever I saw your face I thought the sun rose in your eyes And the moon and stars were the gifts you gave To the dark and the empty skies ... (MacColl ll. 1-4)

As in love songs, lovers complete, fulfill, and constitute one another as whole. "In this sense love is," Zizek suggests, "an interpretation of the desire of the Other: the answer of love is 'I am what is lacking in you; with my devotion to you, with my sacrifice for you, I will fill you out, I will complete you.' " What is more, Zizek says, is that "The operation of love is therefore double: the subject fills in his own lack by offering himself to the other as the object filling out the lack in the Other--love's deception is that this overlapping of two lacks annuls lack as such in a mutual completion" (116). In Christine then, Heed finds her completion; in Heed, Christine finds hers. Would that it had forever remained so lovely for the two of them.

Unfortunately, there is to love a flip side. If it is Heed's fantasy scenario that drives love's positive identificatory narcissism in Morrison's novel, it is Christine's that drives the negative one. It is well known that Freud and Lacan stressed love's contradictory nature. While Freud calls it "ambivalence," Lacan, going back to his early remarks on the mirror stage, speaks of aggressivity or aggressiveness. He connects mirror-stage identification to a primary narcissism, a libido-cum-sexual libido that links a subject to "destructive and even death instincts." These, he suggests, "explain the obvious relationship between narcissistic libido and the alienating I function, and the aggressiveness deriving therefrom in all relations with others, even in relations involving aid of the most good-Samaritan variety" ("Mirror Stage" 79; original emphasis). A paradox of love and identification is that, in this primary narcissism, both posit aggressiveness, a "conflictual tension awakening .. desire for the object of the other's desire," a "primordial confluence that precipitates into aggressive competition" ("Aggressiveness" 92). In a paradoxical way, for both Freud and Lacan, love and identification thus connote their opposites. Put another way, as the title ("Hate") of Darryl Pinckney's review of Love suggests and in a way that bespeaks common wisdom, the flip side of love is hate. In love songs, the sentimental truth of "You are my everything" turns into the unsentimental truth of "You done me wrong, and I'm gonna make you pay." Such emotional intensity comes from the very narcissism of identification. To the extent that post-infantile identification repeats that of the mirror stage, the contradictory tension there occurs in the relation between the narcissistic image of the double and the subject's own body. In one paradox, the very wholeness of the identificatory double seems at some point to threaten that of the subject. But in another, the aggressive tension between identificatory double and identifying subject is marked as well by an erotic tinge. We may think of this as the duality of love, of hearts and flowers giving way" to whips and chains, a binary of love and hate that may well seem intrinsically suicidal when the aggressiveness irrupts into acts of real violence, a phenomenon that in "Presentation on Psychical Causality" Lacan calls "narcissistic, suicidal aggression" (153). When things go wrong between Heed and Christine, we see just how paradoxically connected are love and hate, care and violence.

Aggressiveness displaces care when Christine's grandfather, age fifty-two, marries Heed Johnson, age eleven, and throws the girls into narcissistic competitiveness. While there is much that is wrong in the marriage of a middle-aged man to a prepubescent eleven-year-old, it is not the age differential in itself that is the problem. The problem, as L puts it, is that, in the powerful narcissistic identification the two girls have experienced already, Heed has already been "spoken for." What follows from that bespokenness is disastrous in just about every aspect of life around the Cosey family and its livelihood, as disastrous for Cosey's resort as for various interpersonal relationships. "It was marrying Heed that laid the brickwork for ruination," L says (104). "See, he chose a girl already spoken for. Not promised to anyone by her parents. That trash gave her up like they would a puppy. No. The way I see it, she belonged to Christine and Christine belonged to her" (105). Ruination is certainly what Christine feels. In a passage cognate to--but crucially different from--the one expressing Heed's fantasy scenario, Morrison tells us, in initial phrasing reminiscent of that found in Heed's, Once there was a little girl with white bows on each of her four plaits. She had a bedroom all to herself beneath the attic in a big hotel. Forget-me-nots dotted the wallpaper. Sometimes she let her brand-new friend stay over and they laughed till they hiccuped under the sheets.

But in this scenario the Golden-Book moment ends with banishment. Yet just one of them--Christine--gets sent away. As Morrison tells us, "Then one day the little girl's mother came to tell her she would have to leave her bedroom and sleep in a smaller room on another floor. When she asked her mother why, she was told it was for her own protection. There were things she shouldn't see or hear or know about" (95). As she will do at every traumatic moment in her life, Christine tries to run away from the problem. At five, she had run when her father Billy Boy Cosey died in 1935. In 1947 she runs again when during a celebration of her sixteenth birthday Heed threatened her with lethal violence by setting fire to the mattress on her bed. Here in 1942 at age twelve, when Heed gets married and May feels compelled to move her daughter to a room farther away from the mismatched newlyweds, she runs away. Though she is found and brought back, she never regains a central or secure place in her own family. While much of her disaffection is caused by the wrong Bill Cosey commits, Christine nevertheless prefers to believe that her anger and rootlessness are the fault of that innocent child bride who had been her best friend. In identification, so it goes.

For fifty years, the narcissistic suicidal aggressiveness between Heed and Christine continues. In the mid-1990s, when the women are well into their sixties, Christine tells Junior Viviane, the mysterious young intruder into lives long set into cast-iron grooves, that she was best friends with a child of eleven when her grandfather married. For Christine, it is bad enough, she says, "to have your best and only friend leave the squealing splash in your bathtub, trade the stories made up and whispered beneath sheets in your bed for a dark room at the end of the hall reeking of liquor and an old man's business, doing things no one would describe but were so terrible no one could ignore them. She would not forget that. Why should she? It changed her life" (132-33). But in Christine there is worse, a narcissistic ressentiment. What she most seems to resent is how much she had sacrificed for Heed. "She would never forget," Morrison writes, "how she had fought for her, defied her mother to protect her, to give her clothes: dresses, shorts, a bathing suit, sandals; to picnic alone on the beach. They shared stomachache laughter, a secret language, and knew as they slept together that one's dreaming was the same as the other one's" (131). But beyond this, despite the prepubescence of the two girls, there seems narcissistic resentment arising from what must be construed as sexual jealousy. "One day," Christine recounts, "we built castles on the beach; next day he sat her in his lap. One day we were playing house under a quilt; next day she slept in his bed. One day we played jacks; the next she was fucking my grandfather" (131-32). All this at this time is traumatic enough to Christine, to the extent that at age twelve she was able even to imagine it. What, clearly, was worst of all for her, however, was the ultimate consequence of the marriage her expulsion not only from her bedroom but soon also from the entire house. For Christine, it is as if Heed's sexual fall gets Christine kicked out of paradise. "One day this house was mine," Christine complains; "next day she owned it" (132). Shortly thereafter, sent off to a boarding school, Christine feels totally banished from the presence of her family, sent away, as May puts it, "for her own protection." Whether it is protection from Heed or from Bill Cosey is left interestingly ambiguous.

But narcissistic suicidal aggression also marks Heed's life. Simply too young even to grasp the import of marriage to any man much less one in his fifties, Heed bitterly feels rejected when Christine turns against her and joins forces with her mother to subvert her. After her wedding trip, Heed wants only to return to Christine, to share with her best friend/alter ego tales of her experience (apparently, whatever sexual contact there was, there was no actual genital penetration about which to report). "Wonderful as the honeymoon was," Morrison writes, "she could hardly wait to get back and tell Christine about it. Hurt by her reception, she kept her stories to herself" (129). To make up with her friend, she is eager to share with Christine even the symbol of her marriage. When she offers her wedding ring to Christine, her overture is rebuffed not by her friend but by the surrounding adults, those insistent voices of the Symbolic (cultural) Other. "The one time she tried to make peace with Christine, the kitchen exploded," she recalls. Christine's mother calls her a "little fool." "Even L turned on her," warning her, "Watch yourself," hinting, somewhat cryptically, "The streets don't go there" (129). Regardless of what others think of Heed's manifestly symbolic gesture, Christine herself continues--in her rather formulaic language- -to imagine that the "real betrayal" is perpetrated by Heed, "the friend who grinned happily as she was led down the hall to darkness, liquor smell, and old-man business" (133). Ironically, Heed's marriage to Christine's grandfather however little responsibility could legitimately be attributed to the child, too young even quite to understand sex--simply confirms for May her original fear of Christine's taking up with the Up Beach girl. Having tried "everything to separate the two when they were little girls," May persists in her efforts because she "had known instinctively the intruder was a snake: penetrating, undermining, sullying, devouring" (99).

Even as May and Christine join forces to make war on Heed, aggressiveness marking love's underside becomes most intense between the two former friends because the marriage makes them members of a single family. As Morrison writes, "Families make the best enemies" (139). Once love flips into enmity, one may get as much enjoyment from seeing the enemy punished as one once took from her good fortune. On the erotic side of the death drive, not the less destructive side of desire, this enjoyment is what Lacan calls jouissance. It is jouissance we see expressed in one of Christine's cherished memories, a time when "her grandfather spank[ed] Heed" (134). Suggesting much of the erotically charged relation her identification with Heed brings the both of them, what Christine remembers--how a "flood of pleasure ... came when he took his granddaughter's side against his wife's" and how that "flood of pleasure" added a "delight" that is "deep and rampant"--virtually defines jouissance. But as Christine gets a flood of pleasure from her grandfather's spanking Heed, so also does Heed get intense satisfaction from her husband's protecting her within the Cosey family. It's tit for tat. Despite that memorable spanking, her husband still provides Heed her best weapon against May and Christine. Marriage to the man she calls "Papa" provides her an opportunity "to get out" of Up Beach, "to learn how to sleep in a real bed, to have somebody ask you what you wanted to eat, then labor over the dish." Ironically, a marriage she could hardly have desired turns out to be her best revenge against her enemies.

It also gives her a socially acceptable family to replace a biological one socially ostracized. She feels that once she was married, her predatory biological family "had begun to swarm and bite for blood." Even though the Coseys exact as tribute much humiliation from her, they nonetheless become "her family," albeit one into which she would never have been accepted had it not been for Papa. Though she had "to fight for a place" there, "Papa made it possible. When he was around everybody backed off. Time after time he made it clear--they would respect her" (127). In reality, while May and Christine do back off, what Heed finds is not respect but hatred and contempt and condescension. After Heed returns from the honeymoon, all she can see is that her "friend's eyes were cold." It is as if Heed had betrayed Christine, "instead of the other way around." Worse, upon Heed's futile, though clearly symbolic attempt to put Cosey's ring on Christine's hand, Christine again runs. Crying and shouting in the private language the two girls call Idagay, Christine, in her equivalent of the N-word, hurls at Heed her most hateful message of all: "Ou-yidagay a ave- slidagay! E-hidagay ought-bidagay ou-yidagay ith-widagay a ear's-yidagay ent-ridagay an-didagay a andy-cidagay ar-bidagay!" 'You're a slave. He bought you with a year's rent and a candy bar.' (128) If for a child whom her parents named Heed the Night the best moment of her life was that on the beach when she met her identificatory other in Christine, surely this moment, when her other denies her, is the worst. (8)

In mirroring, narcissistic, identificatory relations, aggressiveness is such a feature that it persists from childhood into adult life. For Heed and Christine, it never really abates. In some sense, it is fortunate that Christine--shipped off to boarding school, then to college, and thereafter making herself an exile from her family- -is rarely around. While in boarding school, she returns once for a belated party celebrating her sixteenth birthday, but this visit ends disastrously when Heed gets that spanking from Papa and later sets fire to a mattress in Christine's bedroom. It is not Heed who is banished for her act, however, but once again Christine. "So who had to go," Christine fumes. "Who had to leave her bedroom, her playhouse, the sea?" Referring to herself in the third person, she answers herself." "The only innocent one in the place, that's who. Even when she returned, a sixteen-year-old, poised and ready to take her place in the family, they threw her away, because by then Heed had become grown-up nasty." Just how nasty, in Christine's view? "Mean enough," Morrison writes, "to set her on fire" (133).

While May believes that Heed is the one more dangerously violent, because she had once set Christine's mattress afire, in truth it seems that bitter resentment makes Christine the one more dangerous to the other. To match Heed's metonymic violence done to a bed, Christine, some twenty-nine years later, attempts to take a knife to Heed at Bill Cosey's funeral. Disarmed by L, Christine fails, but the murderous intent is real enough. Essentially an exile between 1947 and the mid-1970s, Christine returns to the Cosey household in 1975 to stay only after her grandfather's death. (9) In the nearly twenty years preceding the appearance of Junior Viviane in town, the two women again live together in the same house on Monarch Street. There, their conflict becomes as much ritual as warfare. Morrison tells us they never lay down their arms--"Never drawing blood, never apologizing, never premeditating, yet drawn annually to pant through an episode that was as much rite as fight"--but eventually there is a moratorium of sorts. "Finally," Morrison reports, "they stopped, moved into acid silence, and invented other ways to underscore bitterness. Along with age, recognition that neither one could leave played a part in their unnegotiated cease-fire" (73).

Even as aggressiveness in narcissistic identification displaces its dialectical opposite, however, that opposite, love or care or kindness, is never relinquished. Thus at some level the two women, at the end aged well into their sixties, recognize the contradictions in their once-and-future love for and identification with each other. At some depth of awareness was an "unspoken realization that the fights did nothing other than allow them to hold each other" (74). Still, their issues with each other are simply too intense to forget. "Like friendship," Morrison explains, their hatred, apart from "physical intimacy" in the house on Monarch Street, required "creativity and hard work to sustain itself." Indeed, such are their feelings for one another that reconciliation occurs only upon the death of one of them. Strategically, as if to suggest again how deeply goes their identification, Morrison equivocates on who dies. Having hinted broadly that Christine seems to have heart problems long before the brutal fall Heed suffers at Junior's hands in the old Cosey resort, the author refuses to specify who perishes. Before the scene of Heed's fall, before death arrives for one or the other, as "the eyes of each are enslaved by the other's," Morrison's language, describing feelings the old women could hardly articulate, enfigures once again the paradoxical contradictions of any narcissistic identificatory relation. "Opening pangs of guilt, rage, fatigue, despair," Morrison writes, "are replaced by a hatred so pure, so solemn, it feels beautiful, almost holy" (177).

But after Heed falls through that hole in the attic floor at the old resort hotel, where she and Junior Viviane are searching for any sort of document to foil Christine's hopes of gaining the property, it is Christine who suddenly arrives and "gathers Heed in her arms." There on a dusty floor, inside an almost sublime beam of sunlight falling upon them, "each searches the face of the other." In each, the "holy feeling is still alive, as is its purity, but it is altered now," now "overwhelmed by desire." Although desire now has grown so old as to be "decrepit," it still remains "sharp" for them, sharp enough to return them at last to that paradisal moment lost in their childhood. Indeed, in this very place, "a little girl's bedroom," love--"an obstinate skeleton" of love--"stirs, clacks, [and] refreshes itself." After the death of one, the one remaining--thinking her friend "might get cold"--offers her a blanket. "Alone, seated at the table, she speaks to the friend of her life waiting to be driven to the morgue" (198). In this fateful moment, it seems clear that Morrison means to suggest that theirs has been a marriage from which death alone may sunder them. Their relationship--in that primary narcissism marked as much by aggression as by love, by love as much as by aggression--has meant far more in the lives of these two women than any relationship " either has had with anyone else, including Bill Cosey, husband to one, grandfather to the other, and demonic sexual presence to them both. (10)

Works Cited

Abel, Elizabeth, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen, eds. Female Subjects in Black and White." Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997.

Bergner, Gwen. "Myths of Masculinity: The Oedipus Complex and Douglass's 1845 Narrative." The Psychoanalysis of Race. Ed. Christopher Lane. New York: Columbia UP, 1998. 241-60.

Du Bois, W. E. B. Souls of Black Folk. 1903. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1994.

Felman, Shoshana. Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight: Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987.

Fuss, Diana. Identification Papers. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Lacan, Jacques. "Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis." 1948. Ecrits 82-101.

--. Ecrits. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 2005.

--. "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience." 1949. Ecrits 75-81.

--. "The Neurotic's Individual Myth." Trans. Martha Noel Evans. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 48.3 (July 1979): 405-25.

--. "Presentation on Psychical Causality." 1946. Ecrits 123-58.

Laplanche, Jean, and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis. "Identification." 1967. The Language of Psycho-Analysis. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Norton, 1973. 205-08.

MacColl, Ewan. Lyrics. "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face." Music by Ewan MacColl. 1957.

Malinowski, Bronislaw. Sex and Repression in Savage Society. 1927. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Mellard, James M. Beyond Lacan. Albany: SUNY P, 2006.

Morrison, Toni. Love. 2003. New York: Vintage International, 2005.

Obeyesekere, Gananath. The Work of Culture: Symbolic Transformation in Psychoanalysis and Anthropology. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990.

Parsons, Anne. "Is the Oedipus Complex Universal?: The Jones-Malinowski Debate Revisited and a South Italian 'Nuclear Complex.'" The Psychoanalytic Study of Society 3 (1964): 278-328.

Pinckney, Darryl. "Hate." Rev. of Love, by Toni Morrison. New York Review of Books 50.19 (4 Dec. 2003). Web. 13 Mar. 2008.

Roynon, Tessa. "A New 'Romen' Empire: Toni Morrison's Love and the Classics." Journal of American Studies 41.1 (April 2007): 31-47.

Sweeney, Megan. " 'Something Rogue': Commensurability, Commodification, and Justice in Toni Morrison's Later Fiction." Modern Fiction Studies 52.2 (Summer 2006): 440-69.

Tate, Claudia. Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.

Walton, Jean. "Re-Placing Race in (White) Psychoanalytic Discourse: Founding Narratives of Feminism." Abel, Christian, and Moglen 223-51.

Wardi, Anissa Janine. "A Laying on of Hands: Toni Morrison and the Materiality of Love." MELUS 30.3 (Fall 2005): 201-18.

Wyatt, Jean. Risking Difference: Identification, Race, and Community in Contemporary Fiction and Feminism. Albany: SUNY P, 2004.

Zizek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge: MIT P, 2006.

--. The Sublime Object of Ideology. New York: Verso, 1989.

Notes

(1.) As Roynon points out, a number of early reviews of the novel in major venues were "unfavourable" (32fn3). On Love, unlike on Beloved, Jazz, or Paradise, it seems that major scholarly items--such as those by Wardi, Sweeney, and Roynon--have been slow in coming. See, however, Javier Gascuena Gahete, "Narrative Delusion and Aesthetic Pleasure in Toni Morrison's Love," Figures of Belatedness in Postmodernist Fiction in English, Javier Gascuena Gahete and Paula Martin Salvan, eds. (Cordoba, Spain: Universidad de Cordoba, 2006), 259-73; Venkatesan Sathyaraj and Gurumurthy Neelakantan, "'Dragon Daddies and False-Hearted Men': Patriarchy in Toni Morrison's Love," Notes on Contemporary Literature 35.5 (November 2005): 2-4; Venkatesan Sathyaraj and Gurumurthy Neelakantan, "Family and Parenting in Toni Morrison's Love," Notes on Contemporary Literature 36.4 (September 2006): 9-10; and Susana Vega-Gonzalez, "Toni Morrison's Love and the Trickster Paradigm" in Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses 18 (November 2005): 275-89.

(2.) On identification and its uses in literary criticism and interpretation, perhaps the most helpful recent book I have found is Risking Difference, for in it Wyatt provides an extremely intelligent brief survey of the contending views of the concept as well as excellent, and excellently variegated, readings of literary texts, including ones by Toni Morrison. But see also Fuss's Identification Papers. While Wyatt, herself a Lacanian, ultimately takes the view that "identification is desired as an end in itself rather than as a compensation for loss" (14), thus emphasizing the oedipal, and the social, rather than the narcissistic, and the "internal," side of identification, I find Zizek's take on identification rather "post- postmodernist" in its validating both strands of Freud's theorizing. As derived from Zizek's Sublime Object of Ideology, identification for me is not a matter of either/or but--stressing the paradoxical nature of the philosophy Zizek comes to base on a principle of parallax--both/and. It is in The Parallax View (2006) that Zizek suggests how the concept of parallax, the phenomenon in which from a certain perspective two objects or parallel fines converge, becomes the basis of his philosophy. The gap between those objects or lines, and their perspectival convergence, is the paradoxical space within which Zizek, along with (he would say) Hegel and Lacan and others like Alain Badiou, chooses to work. Zizek's philosophy converges, we may say, with the indeterminate world of modern physics.

(3.) On the subject of race and psychoanalysis, in addition to Wyatt's Risking Difference and Fuss's Identification Papers, see the anthology The Psychoanalysis of Race, Christopher Lane, ed. (New York: Columbia UP, 1998). On psychoanalysis and race, sex, and/or gender, see Bergner, Taboo Subjects." Race, Sex, and Psychoanalysis (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2005), which also includes a revised version of her essay on Frederick Douglass, and Abel, Christian, and Moglen. On such issues as racism, sexism, homophobia, colonialism, and writing itself, as well as for Lacanian-cum Zizekian readings of The Bluest Eye and Beloved, see Robert Samuels, Writing Prejudices: The Psychoanalysis and Pedagogy of Discrimination from Shakespeare to Toni Morrison (Albany: SUNY P, 2001).

(4.) The title of an essay by Hortense J. Spillers, "'All the Things You Could Be by Now, If Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your Mother': Psychoanalysis and Race" (Abel, Christian, and Moglen 135-58), says virtually everything, as it puts into cultural and historical context many of the pertinent issues for blacks and here in particular, black women in America. As Walton points out, "[U]ntil the work of Frantz Fanon in the 1950s, and, more recently, of other theorists in the last decade, psychoanalysis was not seriously considered a likely arena for the exploration and critique of racialized constructions of subjectivity. As it was being institutionalized, psychoanalysis seemed to thrive on the 'external problem' of how to extend and modify Freud's male-centered theories of sexual development so that they would be equally applicable to women, but it shrank from the charge that it was also focused too narrowly on the subjectivity of the white, European patients who provided the clinical material from which it was elaborated" (223). Most prominently, it was Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks that took Freudian and, indeed, Lacanian theory to the analysis of racialized subjectivity.

(5.) In Risking Difference, in chapter 4, Wyatt discusses race and identification in Sula and, in chapter 3, trauma and identification in Beloved. Elsewhere in the book, in other contexts regarding identification, she mentions Tar Baby's Jadine and Pecola of The Bluest Eye.

(6.) With due respect to Du Bois's concept of 'double consciousness,' every subject, regardless of race (or class or whatever), experiences such a phenomenon simply by virtue of the gap between self and other. But for black subjects in America, the problem of double consciousness is that the other associated with the dominant cultural gaze always carries the intolerant authority of the cruel superego. It is as if the meanest 'father' we might imagine were forever demanding what cannot be given--that one be white like the source of that Superego gaze--or can be given only in secret, in the phenomenon known as passing. Is there any wonder that before our own time (and, obviously, even during this one) blacks and other alienated minorities might choose to 'pass'? Regarding passing and double consciousness in our literary and cultural history, the (doubly) ironic tipping point, one coinciding with Black Power and the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, is perhaps the publication in 1961 of John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me. There, a white author reversed the African American ploy and 'passed' as a black man. Readers today would be surprised by how powerfully Griffin's experience moved readers then. Still, they would note nonetheless that the more things change, the more they stay the same: it took a white man passing as a black man to persuade whites just how insidious was the white cultural gaze that created black double consciousness in the first place.

(7.) Thematically and structurally, L plays crucial roles in the novel. On one of them, Wardi has written, "Considering Morrison's revelation [in an interview with Adam Langer called "Star Power" (Book Standard [November/December 2003]: 40-46)] that an earlier title for Love was L, it is reasonable to read L as the embodiment of love in the text. Just as the word 'love' is almost never uttered in this novel, L's full name is withheld, as is her voice in the community" (204). Sweeney also addresses the question of L's name. Pointing to a scene narrated as if omnisciently by L in representing Heed's and Christine's experiencing that first identificatory "passion," L says, "If your name is the subject of First Corinthians, chapter 13"--and that subject is indeed love--"it's natural to make it your business" (199).

Apart from the thematic and titular relation of "L" to "love," there is a significant narrative role the character plays. Since L died in the 1970s and Morrison sets the novel's narrative present in the mid-1990s, it becomes plain that the five italicized passages she narrates occur postmortem. What are we to make of this? Morrison has always liked to include the supernatural in her fiction: think Beloved, but there are such phenomena in Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Jazz, and Paradise as well. Given her ambivalent relation to Bill Cosey and the entire Cosey clan, we might consider L an unreliable narrator. But my impression is that while she performs "unreliable" acts while alive (after all, she murders Cosey and forges a will leaving his assets to his surviving family members rather than to Celestial), she is in fact the voice through which Morrison herself speaks when in her most thematic mode. On L as narrator, Wardi writes, "While her voice is critical to the narrative, the community knows her primarily through action, not proclamation" (206). Likewise, she writes, "Given her import in the novel, the fact that she speaks after death is all but irrelevant" (205). Also on L's narration, amid a long sequence on the topic, Sweeney writes, "Other characters' perspectives complicate L's readings, but her narratives bear particular significance because they frame the novel, providing crucial threads that tie together the plot, and because they offer an explicit challenge to revise the disciplinary narratives and legal discourses around which the plot revolves" (447). The fact is, if L is truly unreliable as a narrator, the novel simply implodes.

(8.) Exhibiting Morrison's genius in giving characters strangely significant names, Heed's full name seems particularly important. When Heed first comes under Bill Cosey's scrutiny, telling him her name is not just Heed but Heed the Night, he grasps the imperative in the words and replies, "I should. I really should" (191), meaning, one surmises, that he ought, but probably won't resist his pedophilic drives. It is just moments later that he touches her and initiates one of the novel's cruelest plot lines. At least two critics, Sweeney (466n16) and Pinckney, have linked "Heed the Night" to the New Testament. In a review of the novel, Pinckney suggests that in the child's name Morrison alludes to 1 Cor. 7:23: "You were bought at a price; do not become slaves of men." If Pinckney is correct, then it must also point to 1 Cor. 6:20: "You do not belong to yourselves; you were bought at a price" (New English Bible). As Christine charges in her angry outburst in Idagay, Heed was indeed bought, for a year's rent and a candy bar, and in a sense thus justifies the girl's epithet, "slave." Oddly, and I assume not invoked by Morrison, there is a command, "Heed not the night," found in the 1836 poem, "The Strange Lady," by the nineteenth- century American poet William Cullen Bryant A cautionary fable warning young men not to be seduced by the blandishments of lovely ladies in the woods, the poem eventuates in the youth's not heeding the terrors of the night, with the result that nothing of him but "fragments of a human form" are left behind.

(9.) For a fine, detailed discussion of this period of exile in Christine's life, see Sweeney 450-53.

(10.) While the relation of the two girls to Bill Cosey is absolutely central to Love, it is not central in the beginning to the narcissistic identification the two experience. Still, even before the marriage to Heed, Cosey's pedophilia--acted out in the fondling of Heed, and expressed in a scene of masturbation that Christine observes but hardly understands--represents for the children a sexual initiation that in different ways psychologically disables each of them but in both produces an impediment to a normalized fulfillment of their identificatory relationship.