From the Fantastic to Magic Realism: The Spectral Presence in Phyllis Perry’s Stigmata
p. 223-248
Résumé
This paper will examine how Phyllis Perry’s Stigmata (1998) reworks traditional narrative devices in order to recreate a partially lost and fragmented history of the female slave. I will consider how Perry engages with the magical in order to rework the narrative model presented by Toni Morrison in Beloved (1987). In Stigmata, the protagonist’s journey is one from the fantastic, the estrangement from her family and society at large, to magical realism—signalled by the acceptance of the supernatural and her return to the community. In Stigmata, Perry interrogates both the nature of reality and its representation, introducing an innovative narrative form that reflects an imaginative world where the boundaries between the earthly and the ghostly become blurred. I will examine how magical realism provides the necessary narrative strategy through which a lost history can be recreated and how the ancestral spectre can function as a means of translating the absences of African American history into tangible presences, revising the tradition of the ghost tale in the search for new modes of representation.
Texte intégral
1In Stigmata (1998), Phyllis Perry plays with the conventions of the fantastic in order to represent African American history. In The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, Tzvetan Todorov states that
[t] he fantastic [...] lasts only as long as a certain hesitation: a hesitation common to the reader and character, who must decide whether or not what they perceive derives from “reality” as it exists in the common opinion. [...] If he [or she] decides that the laws of reality remain intact and permit an explanation of the phenomena described, we say that the work belongs to another genre: the uncanny. If, on the contrary, he [or she] decides that new laws of nature must be entertained to account for the phenomena, we enter the genre of the marvellous.
The fantastic therefore leads a life full of dangers, and may evaporate at any moment.1
2Perry’s novel explores the tensions between the fantastic which, as Todorov defines it, depends on the reader’s and the character’s hesitation “between a natural and a supernatural explanation of the events described” (33) and the supernatural accepted, or the marvellous, what I will call magical realism. In this novel the protagonist’s journey is one from the fantastic, the estrangement from her family and society at large, to magical realism, signalled by the acceptance of the supernatural and her return to the community.
3Upon receiving a trunk containing among other things the diary of her great-great-grandmother and a quilt sewn by her grandmother, Lizzie begins to journey to these women’s past. In Stigmata, the device of time travelling does not simply imply that a character becomes a mere observer or participant in the events of another era. Lizzie does not witness her foremothers’ lives from a distance, rather she becomes Ayo and Grace: “When I open [my eyes] again, Grace is with me—or I am with her. [...] I sit on the old bed with Grace, marveling that I can move her fingers and toes”.2 Thus, Lizzie’s experiences of the supernatural suggest a sense of “fluid identities and interconnectedness”,3 as Wendy B. Faris puts it in relation to another novel. The manner in which Lizzie represents these first journeys to the past suggests that the character is in the realm of the fantastic:
A sound startles me. [...] My eyes fly open and I look down. At my feet a hairbrush lay on the wood floor, and as I bend to pick it up I absently consider the fact that my mother’s new carpet, the carpet just installed three months ago, seems to have disappeared. [...]
For a moment I can’t think, can’t feel my body in this place. I can only see the scene before me [...] (53-54).
4The narration of this episode contains elements which express the character’s hesitation between the real and the magical. The expression “seems to have disappeared” illustrates this vacillation between a more natural explanation of the event and the experience of the supernatural. This is reinforced by the fact that Lizzie cannot “[f] or a moment” feel her body in this other supernatural realm. This expression of her inability to think and “feel [her] body” is significant since it directs the reader’s interpretation of the narrated occurrence towards the world of the dreams. An interpretation corroborated by the character who articulates it in contradictory terms: “I get up slowly, painfully. The whole episode didn’t feel like a dream, but I must have slept, and in an awkward position” (56). Without these elements that denote doubt, “we should be plunged into the world of the marvellous, with no reference to everyday reality” (38), as Todorov observes. The language used to communicate the experience of the supernatural is, thus, at the crossroads between the real and the magical and constitutes one of the central aspects of the discourse of the fantastic.
5For Todorov,
[t] he supernatural is born of language, it is both its consequence and its proof: not only do the devil and vampires exist only in words, but language alone enables us to conceive what is always absent: the supernatural. The supernatural thereby becomes a symbol of language, just as the figures of rhetoric do (82).
6This is particularly relevant in texts which attempt to represent the absences in the African American historical record. When the first-person narrator declares that the tangible and familiar world of her parents’ house “seems to have disappeared”, or “[it] didn’t feel like a dream, but I must have slept”, she creates with language this other space, which does not correspond to the perceived reality, or to an unquestioned magical realm, but to a space of hesitation between the two; she conceives a place for the fantastic. This hesitation between the real and the fantastic becomes a prevailing pattern in the novel until Lizzie begins to make sense of her experiences: “I don’t know who to tell. Not them, the parents, who’ll say how I was dreaming. No, I was there. I was Grace. [...] Gotta be a dream. I was sitting here daydreaming” (74), or “When I woke up, or came to, or whatever, it didn’t feel like a dream. [...] But I had to be asleep” (83). It is worth noting that the substantive “dream” functions as a symbol for the unexplained, for Lizzie’s “fantastic out-of-body story” (82). Unable to make sense of her experience, Lizzie resorts to everyday language in an attempt to normalise her experience of the supernatural.
7Lizzie’s experiences expressed in a language of hesitation to sceptical interlocutors contribute to her gradual alienation from social structures in which there is no place for the magical: her middle-class family, educational system, and later, Western medicine. “Unlike magical realism”, as P. Gabrielle Foreman states, “the fantastic and the uncanny posit an individual who experiences a world beyond the community’s parameters”.4 The opening of Stigmata is meaningfully set in a psychiatric hospital. This “padded cell” (1) functions in the narrative as a literal and figurative space of rupture between the protagonist and her community. This is signalled most significantly by Lizzie’s relationship with her parents and the orderly middle-class world they create in which the magical is interpreted as mental disorder. Perry uses constructs of class and consumption in order to represent this alienation from the rituals and beliefs of the ancestors.
8In Perry’s work, the South of the 1970s to the mid 1990s is clearly not represented as the “nonmoney economy”,5 which Susan Willis identifies as prevailing in contemporary African American women’s writing. In Stigmata, Southern black society is not free from the politics of class that emerged in the North during the same period. In this context, it is worth noting how notions of consumption interfere with the way characters interpret the world. Years of Western education and a self-conscious adoption of white middle-class values obscure Lizzie’s father vision. When he sees the trunk with the family relics passed on to Lizzie, he misinterprets it as mere property, missing its magical significance: “All that mystery, all that talk about giving it at the right time to the right person”. He rolls his eyes. “That trunk should be your property, shouldn’t it, Sarah?” (22).
9 Lizzie’s mother, “speaking her college-bred English” (25), also lost the essential connection with her ancestors which would allow her to interpret the world in a way distinct from that of the hegemonic white culture. Looking at her mother’s quilt, a composition in which she narrates the history of her ancestors, Mrs Dr DuBose cannot read the text before her. Educated in a history which follows chronology, and is therefore linear, she cannot decode the circular narrative before her: “What kind of quilt is that anyway? Just some pictures stuck to a background. No rhyme or reason. She [her mother] wrote about it like it was supposed to mean something” (23). In this way, the newly found quilt is in the danger of being lost as a source of meaning.6 For the meaning to be recovered, Sarah has to recognise the quilt as a text that can be read and interpreted, and a medium through which her mother expressed her creativity and historical legacy.
10The separation between Lizzie and her parents is also signalled by Perry’s usage of a first-person narrator. In the magical realist text, the belief in the supernatural is reinforced by non-dramatised omniscient narrators. If magic incidents are narrated by such narrators, as Todorov states, “we should immediately be in the marvellous; there would be no occasion, in fact, to doubt his [or her] words. [...] It is no accident that tales of the marvellous rarely employ the first person” (83).7 Hence, the belief in the magical is closely related to an omniscient narrator, who takes the magical for granted and, therefore, as a continuum of the real. The dramatised narrator in the first-person narrative, in turn, is particularly suitable and more common in fantastic narratives because, as Todorov puts it, “[t] his narrator discourse has an ambiguous status, [...] emphasizing one or another of its aspects: as the narrator’s, the discourse lies outside the test of truth; as the character’s it must pass the test” (86). In other words, the “character can lie, while the narrator must not” (85). In the description of the same episode by the narrator and the character, the gaps between the first and the latter’s discourse are obvious:
The ground slowly rolls under my feet. I smell—taste—sweat and blood and months of misery. The scent knocks me dizzy for a moment and I stumble forward. Then I am pulled, jerked. [...] I see the deck, the water beyond and the line of dark bodies going jerkily forward into the ghost-land (86).
11The narrator’s depiction of a slave ship in such sensorial terms illustrates the authenticity of Lizzie’s experience. However, when the character attempts to reconstruct that same episode her fragmented account reconstructs the necessary hesitation in the fantastic narrative:
I was on a ship [...]. A slave ship, Daddy. [...] Maybe I was just sleepwalking. [...] I keep... winking out. [...] I said sometimes it’s like I get drowsy. Other times I’m just doing something else and I have a flash back of some moment or some place. I remember something that I know can’t be true (101).
12This tension between the narrator’s and the character’s discourse keeps the essential doubt (to believe or disbelieve) characteristic of the fantastic narrative. This is critical in a work that explores the tension between the fantastic and the magical real, between the character’s alienation from the community and the necessity to understand individual experience in the context of the group’s history.
13In Perry’s novel, the experience of the fantastic is reinforced by the stigmata which appear in Lizzie’s body. In African American literature, the disfigurement of the body constitutes a central vehicle of both personal and collective history.8 Lizzie’s stigmata work as a physical manifestation of Morrison’s concept of rememory, the never-ending resurfacing of a traumatic and partially lost history. On another level, stigmata function as a powerful means to transform abstract history into a tangible reality. At this level the open wounds work as an element of connection between the ancestors and Lizzie, the past and present, and the real and the magical: “you’re marked so you won’t forget this time, so you will remember” (214). In this context, it is worth noting that when Lizzie makes reference to her marked body, she evokes her bond with the foremothers:
A spasm of pain sears my back. I gasp, trying to keep my focus, and in that moment Grace steps forward and takes the blow. We stand together in her battered body, bent double with pain (125).
14In this passage grandmother and granddaughter stand together in a magical realm receiving the blow which marked the back of the first woman of the family, Ayo, the African. Lizzie’s “maze of scars, from neck to waist and beyond, permanent remembrance of the power of time folded back upon itself” (205) are the evidence of a forgotten history. Like Morrison’s rememory, Perry’s stigmata constitute the urgent call of history pressing against the forgetfulness of time.
15However, the ancestral apparition in Perry’s novel is quite different from Morrison’s unforgiving ghost. It is worth noting that when “Grace steps forward to take the blow”, she emerges as a protective figure. In this sense, the name “Grace” becomes highly significant. According to Christian beliefs only the grace of God can free humanity from its original sin which in the context of Perry’s work can be equated with the loss of African American history. On another level, it is worth noting the distinction made by St Thomas Aquinas between nature and the supernatural. According to Aquinas, the former can be known by reason, while the latter can only be understood through the Grace of God. Thus, Lizzie’s grandmother functions in the text as a bridge to the magical and the knowledge of the past it holds.
16The acquisition of that knowledge is a painful process and the “[p] roof of lives intersecting from past to present” (205) is the imprint of slavery in Lizzie’s body. The use of the vocable “intersection” highlights the novel’s attempt to represent the effects of slavery in contemporary America. In this way, Perry’s protagonist functions in the text as an epicentre for African American history. Lizzie’s experience of the supernatural allowed her to learn the ancestors’ names and their history by becoming them in a fusion of minds and bodies, literally moving inside them, “mov [ing] [their] fingers and toes” and returning home “with dirty feet” (106) from old African dust: “I can see her [Grace] and I can see through her. I remember what her body feels like. And both of us, me and her, are sort of superimposed on another person [Ayo]” (140). The merging of individual subjectivity with that of ancestral others embodies a collective memory that needs to be honoured and remembered. This notion of subjectivity evokes Morrison’s representation of a transhistorical self in Beloved. In this way, the apparitions in both Perry’s and Morrison’s works “refuse to remain locked into modern categories of individual psychology, insisting instead that the self is actualized by participation in communal and cosmic categories”,9 as Zamora puts it.
17With Lizzie’s acknowledgement of her multiple subjectivity, the fact that she is “Old and young. Old and young at the same time” (45), there is a narrative departure from the fantastic, the “[t] he soft opening and closing of a door between adjacent worlds” (55), to an acceptance of “the forces that have brought [her] to stand here with a clear view of the past and the present and the marriage of both” (155). It is worth noting that the “adjacent” worlds, close but separate, on frontier of which resided the place for hesitation between the real and the magical, become married, one, when the hesitation dissipates and Lizzie understands that past and present, and the magical and the real are part of the same realm. In this way, according to Todorov’s theoretical approach to the fantastic, Stigmata can be included among “works that sustain the hesitation characteristic of the true fantastic for a long period, but that ultimately end in the marvellous or in the uncanny” (44). When the sense of hesitation dissipates, the frontier between the real and the magical, which Todorov describes as “a frontier between two adjacent realms” (44), is also dissolved and both character and reader enter in the magical real. Once we enter the realm of the magic accepted, our perception of the world is changed in order to accommodate phenomena that are not subject to physical laws. In this context, we leave the fantastic and enter the magical real.10 It is important to emphasise here the fickleness of the fantastic text, a genre which “leads a life full of dangers, and may evaporate at any moment” (Todorov 1975: 52). This is a critical aspect in Perry’s narrative since this transition from the fantastic to the magical real will mark the central character’s shift from a place of isolation to one where history can be shared and actualised.
18 This merging of the real and the magical, as Morrison states, has origins in the “acceptance of the supernatural and a profound rootedness in the real world at the same time with neither taking precedence over the other”.11 The merging of the real and the magical without one having primacy over the other is the most central aspect of the magic realist text. Magic in African American literature, thus, has origins in beliefs and superstitions that inform black folklore and is, therefore, distinct from other literary traditions which merge the real and the magical. In an interview with Gail Calwell,
Morrison nods at the comparison between black American folklore and magic realism, though she says that she was well into Song of Solomon before she discovered Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
“Their stuff was so readily available to them—that mixture of Indian and Spanish. Whereas I felt the preachers, the storytelling, the folklore, the music was very accessible to me, but I felt almost alone. It wasn’t only mine, but I didn’t have any literary precedent for what I was trying to do with the magic”.12
19Morrison clearly roots her use of the supernatural in distinct African American cultural traditions ranging from storytelling to folklore and music. This allows writers such as Morrison and Perry to create their works around distinctive African American narrative modes, while reworking the use of folklore in black American literature.
20 Edward P. Jones reiterates Morrison’s ideas about the role of magic in black writing. In the plot of his first novel, The Known World (2003), the magical emerges occasionally in an otherwise realistic narrative. These supernatural incidents, which are left unexplained, point towards a view of the world in which the real and the magic share the same space. In an interview the author explains how this sense of magic has its roots in African American folklore:
I was raised among a people who believe that if a person is killed on a city street, the blood of that person will show on that spot every time it rains. [...] I was raised to believe that one’s hair should be taken from combs and brushes and burned [...] because the hair could somehow get out into the world where birds could find it, make a nest of the hair, and give the person headaches. [...]
Given all that, it’s easy to create a situation where lightning runs away from a man because the lightning doesn’t think it’s time for the man to die [...]. So the supernatural events are just another way of telling the story by someone who grew up thinking that the universe did weird things all the time.13
21Jones describes a system of beliefs which seeks to explain the inexplicable. Lines are drawn between certain events so that an ordering principle emerges. This allows a disenfranchised people to make sense of the world outside officially sanctioned organisations and discourses. Hence, the supernatural as “another way of telling the story” is a vehicle of empowerment in the construction of narratives that challenge and resist hegemonic forms of representation. The rejection of a binary polarisation between the dominant traditions and other African American “way [s] of knowing things” is evident in the lack of explanation, or justification for the use of the supernatural in The Known World and Beloved.
22However, the removal of the hierarchy between the real and the magical can emerge only take place in a communal context. When Lizzie finally leaves the psychiatric hospital and returns to her parents’ house, she knows that the past needs to be remembered and actualised in the context of the community. The actualisation of the historical past by cultural practice is an essential means of recovering African American history. Folk traditions such as religious rituals, song and storytelling, food and quilt making constitute an important means of bearing witness to the past. Thus, it is interesting to note that among Beloved’s fractured memories of the Middle Passage, there is a record of a song, a cultural scrap, a testimony of the humanity of the person who sang it and of those who listened to it. In Perry’s novel that fragment of cultural memory is a piece of blue cloth that Ayo brought from Africa, creased in a ball enclosed in her fist as a tangible memory of home. The scrap of fabric functions in the narrative as a link to Africa, but it also symbolises the passing on of the historical testimony along the generational line. Ayo’s mother, the master dyer, made and tinted the fabric, Ayo brought it from Africa, Grace uses a piece in her quilt and puts another fragment in the trunk as a family relic destined for her granddaughter and “a very old bit of blue cloth” (17) reaches Lizzie, which she uses it in her own quilt to be passed on the next generation.14
23 “Quilts”, as Floris Barnett Cash states, “can be used as resources in reconstructing the experiences of African-American women. They provide a record of their cultural and political past. [...] The voices of black women are stitched within their quilts”.15 In this sense, the quilt constitutes another form of oral history: “I’m telling Grace’s story with this quilt—just as she told Ayo’s story with hers—and the fabric has to hold up at least until the next story teller comes along” (64). The use of vocables such as “telling” and “story teller” highlight the function of the quilt as a significant narrative form. “The narrative quilts”, as Cash observes, “are a distinct American form” (34). However, as this critic goes on to say, the “use of appliqued [sic] techniques is rooted in African culture” (34). In this way, Lizzie’s appliquéd quilt, “[l] ike Grandmamma Grace’s” (60), reflects the hybrid nature of African American tradition. The technique Lizzie uses in the making of the quilt is similar to that used in the tapestries of West Africa, while the narrative structure roots it in an American tradition, evoking the geographical and cultural journey of black people from the African continent to the New World.
24In this way, Lizzie’s sense of design points to a distinct African American aesthetic. For example, it is worth noting Lizzie’s reference to the African American artist Romare Bearden (Perry 1999: 52). Bearden’s modernist aesthetic combines traditional black American techniques such as the patterns of quilt making and jazz with photography in order to represent a tableau of past and present, personal and collective experience of the people of African descent in America. “Through his work”, as Sharon F. Patton observes, “Bearden attempted to create [...] an autobiography, and a historical narrative of black life”,16 recalling the personal and historical record which Lizzie attempts to design. The pictorial representation of history in Bearden’s photomontages is particularly relevant to Lizzie for whom the quilt is a means of “reclaiming [her] sixty-one-year-old daughter” (94), Sarah, by revealing to her a lost history via a sequence of images.
25Sarah is Lizzie’s mother, weakened by the years her daughter spent in psychiatric institutions, but she is also Grace/Lizzie’s daughter, the child abandoned by her mother at the age of seven when the weight of the past drove her away from her present, her family and community. Thus, in Stigmata, the mother/daughter relationship is the focal point of history. Lizzie engages her mother/daughter in the making of the quilt as an attempt to reveal her multiple subjectivity. However, when Sarah lost her connection to the ancestors, she also lost those distinct African American ways of passing on the testimony and is, therefore, confused by Lizzie’s choice of form for her quilt: “‘You could tell better what was going on if the pictures were in a row’, Mother grumbles [...]. ‘This is hopelessly jumbled’” (94). Sarah finds “the design unsettling” (94) because her Western education taught her to read history as a chronological and, therefore, linear narrative.
26The quilt functions in the narrative as vehicle of cultural recovery. Quilt making, as a group activity, is an important aspect of what Perry attempts to achieve with this specific usage of African American folklore. In this context, the process of sewing the blanket is as important as the end product. According to Pat Ferrero, quilting bees were “invaluable agents of cultural cohesion and group identity”.17 Thus, in order to recognise in the quilt the story of her own mother and Lizzie’s multiple identity, Sarah has to engage in African American traditional cultural practice. In other words, the quilt serves an instrument for Sarah’s reintegration in the community’s traditions and history, establishing a common ground for the reunion between mother and daughter.
27The symbolic, or pictorial nature of quilts is critical in the representation of African American history. In Stigmata, images are a crucial means of depicting a traumatic history. The symbolic quality of the images used both in the quilt and in John Paul’s paintings emphasise not only distinct African American narrative modes, which do not use the written word as a mode of representation, but also highlight the difficulty in using verbal language to express the experience of slavery, evoking Beloved’s words: “how can I say things that are pictures”.18
28In Stigmata, functioning in conjunction with the recovery of traditional cultural practices as a means of reimagining the past in ways which are meaningful and useful in the present, is the characters’ acceptance of the magical. This acceptance of the supernatural makes the journey back to the past a cathartic passage, allowing the transcendence of a ghostly past and the communion with the ancestors. In this context, memory and the conscious act of remembering are key issues in the construction of a context in which past and present can be reconciled:
I am free, I remember. These things can’t hurt me anymore. The story on those diary pages belongs to me, but they don’t own me. My memories live somewhere spacious now; the airless chamber of horrors has melted into the ground (46-47).
29Lizzie’s initial experience of the supernatural trapped her in a painful cycle of repetition in which she acted out a ghostly past for which there seemed to be no room or purpose in the present. Thus, the engagement with a traumatic past is a painful journey and it constitutes a simultaneous process of discovery of the ancestral other and of one self.
30Thus, it is significant that just before Sarah recognises in Lizzie her long lost mother, she carries the quilt, “the keys that unlock the door to what you call the past”, “like a gushing wound that she cradles close to her chest” (225). The red cloth draped in Sarah’s arms evokes both the bloody history of the foremothers and the pain of its memory for their descendants.
31Linear history allowed Sarah to live in a straight line, with her back turned to her past, the process of making the quilt allows her to acknowledge history as a force present in the shared space of memory—a space inhabited by the living and the dead. It is Sarah’s revision of a sense of history based on white Western modes of representation that allows her to acknowledge the ancestors and their sorrowful history, realising that “the slaves who were our selves had so much to say”,19 as Notozake Shange puts it. Once Lizzie, and later Sarah, understands that the magical is a means of reviving a lost and forgotten past, history becomes a regenerative force.
32This recognition of the past expressed in the faith of the community is central to the interpretation of Stigmata as a text that begins in the fantastic and ends in the magically real, signalling the acceptance of the magical and the recovery of a lost history. Lizzie and Sarah reclaim the foremothers’ story, acknowledging the importance of the past in their lives in twentieth-century America. The present is, therefore, embedded in the past, and history is spatial rather than temporal. In this context, it is important to emphasise the significance of Lizzie’s quilt where past and present merge in a graphic space. This evokes the techniques used in Bearden’s collages where African American history is represented, as Patton states, in “an overall shallow pictorial space [...]. There is a similar jazz-rhythm created for the eye in the juxtaposition of different-sized figures in one spatial plane” (189). The concept of juxtaposition of different figures and their projection in a “pictorial space” is useful in articulating Perry’s representation of identity, the supernatural, and history. Lizzie’s experience of the supernatural juxtaposes past and present in a space shared by her and her foremothers. In this space where past and present come together, their identities are also juxtaposed in order to represent a sense of self which is multiple, mythical, and therefore representative of the African American experience. In this sense, chronological history gives way to a spatial sense of history characterised by the converging of times and identities in the shared space of memory. Thus, quilt making becomes a canvas of synthesis in which seemingly contradictory forces such as past and present, personal and collective can be contained, evoking Baker’s view of the blues as a “a robust matrix, where endless antinomies are mediated and understanding and explanation finds conditions of possibility”.20 Bearden’s collages also contain these paradoxical elements. His technique, as Ralph Ellison states, reflects “leaps in consciousness, distortions, paradoxes, reversals, telescoping of time and surreal blending of styles, values, hopes and dreams which characterize much of the Negro history”.21 In this context, quilt making as a form of synthesis, mirrors the magical realist text in its attempt to present real and the magical as part of the same continuum, while revising the hegemonic historical record.22
33In Stigmata, Perry seeks to enlarge a narrative space constricted by realist principles of time, space, and identity in order to represent the silenced voices of history. In order to achieve this the novelist uses a series of narrative techniques, producing a written patchwork of Lizzie’s and her foremothers’ histories, creating a narrative space for the contemporary narrator and the voices of the ancestors. The supernatural represents the central vehicle for the representation of history, but Perry uses others, constructing an intricate narrative pattern. A primary characteristic of this narrative is a call and response structure, which facilitates the dialogue between Lizzie and her foremothers. Her memory of the day Ayo was kidnapped in an African market encapsulates the call and response structure which informs the novel. Ayo’s mother puts “her hand on [Ayo’s/Lizzie’s] head” (24)23 and wakes her up: “We have a long way. We must start” (24). This call from the ancestor initiates the critical journey from home to the market. For Ayo, this is a trip without return that symbolises other journeys, the Middle Passage and Lizzie’s return to the ancestral past. The ancestors’ call from the past is the primary medium of historical reconstruction.
34 Stigmata is also structured around Lizzie’s journal entries interwoven with Joy’s diary (signalled in italics), which in turn contains Ayo’s dictated narrative. Joy’s journal is a narrative of dialogical intimacy clearly lost with the disintegration of family units when several generations no longer live in close proximity. This facilitates not only the necessary trust to relate the experience of slavery, but also the record of the mundane tasks which bond families and communities:
Frank got Mama garden turned over. She say she gon wait another week though cause she say more frost comin. Meantime she makin a little dress [...] for the girl baby she say is comin. Aint no baby comin Mama I say. [...] She cant get here cause Im in the way she say (33-34).
35The use of “I say”, “she say” is a clear mark of the continuous dialogue between mother and daughter, but the representation of the ordinary in this passage reveals Ayo’s sixth sense, the one that allowed her to predict weather and the arrival of her granddaughter, and foresee her own death. Joy’s silent wait for a child after being “married a long time” (34) is also subtly revealed. In the call and response strategy repetition is a key issue in passing on history. It is by repetition that history is shared and memorised. For example Ayo’s dedication of her narrative is repeated with variations. These variations are quite minor, but they signal the reappearance of certain passages in Joy’s diary, emphasising their importance in Ayo’s story.24
36Perry’s representation of the written record as a valid way to record African American history and the introduction of Joy’s journal both as a narrative device and as evidence that former slaves recorded their stories and passed them on to the subsequent generations in contexts completely outside the abolitionist circuit constitute an innovative aspect of Perry’s novel. In addition, she continues and reworks the tradition of the African American novel. Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa, like Ayo, also entrusts her life story to her descendant, rejecting the figure of a white abolitionist as amanuensis. Dessa Rose ends with the protagonist entrusting her life story to her grandchild, who in turn will “say it back” (236), producing a written record of the foremother’s history. In Stigmata, the reader witnesses the importance of that written record in the lives of the women of Ayo’s lineage, stressing how the written word can be populated with a distinct African American cadence, intention, and imagination, to paraphrase Mikhail Bakhtin. This clearly contrasts with the distrust of the written word in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora and Morrison’s assertion that Beloved’s story is not one “to pass on” (274). In fact, the only written record of Beloved, beside the news clip on her mother’s deviant deed, is seven letters engraved in her tombstone given in exchange for a few minutes of sex.
37 In the refrain of the final chapter of Beloved, “It was not a story to pass on” (274-5), there is an obvious inherent paradox. The story has already been passed on to the reader and history, which in the closing of the novel emerges as the occasional “knuckles brushing a cheek in sleep seeming to belong to the sleeper” (275), has already been presented “as muscle and flesh for the real and living bones of history”,25 as Margaret Walker puts it, and resurrected by the author’s imagination. In this way, in the ending of Beloved, Morrison plays with preconceived notions of reality in order to demonstrate how realistic modes of representation limit the unexplained, and more importantly, do not recreate a history for which there are no records. Thus, the closing of Beloved serves as a metafictional commentary on illusion; an illusion which does not emanate from the magical, but from realistic modes of representation. Magical realist authors, as Zamora puts it,
write against the illusionism of narrative realism by heightening their own narrative investment in illusion. They undermine the credibility of narrative realism by flaunting the relative incredibility of their own texts. In short, they point to literary devices by which “realistic” literary worlds are constructed and constrained, and they dramatise by counterrealistic narrative strategies the ways in which those literary worlds (and their inhabitants) may be liberated. (501)
38In this way, the magical realist text is essentially a text of counter narrative that aims at critiquing, revising, and transforming the world as perceived in hegemonic forms of representation. In the African American text this exercise of transformation aims at recreating stereotypical views of identity and history. The supernatural emerges both in Beloved and Stigmata as the central agent for this transformation of the world. This necessity to transform linear history and narratives comes from practices of institutional abuse and a need to fill in the gaps of a lost history, unsettling forms of univocal discourse. According to Salman Rushdie, “the fiction of the Victorian age, which was realist, has [...] been inadequate as a description of the world for some time now [...]. For realism to convince, there must be a fairly broad agreement between the author and the reader about the nature of the world that is being described”. However, as Rushdie goes on to say, “now we don’t have this kind of consensus about the world”.26 In this sense, the magical realist text emerges as text of polyphony. In the African American context, the ancestral apparition emerges as a voice that needs to be rescued from the caverns of time and memory. However, for the past to be recovered, the ancestors’ voices have to find an echo in those of the descendants so that the historical record can be revised and actualised; history becomes a space in which time is freed from simple linearity, a world that is “multiple, permeable, transformative, animistic”.
Bibliographie
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Works cited
Baker, Houston, Jr. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Caldwell, Gail. “Author Toni Morrison Discusses Her Latest Novel Beloved, 1987.” Conversations with Toni Morrison, Danille Taylor-Guthrie, ed. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994.
Cash, Floris Barnett. “Kinship and Quilting: An Examination of an African-American Tradition”. Journal of Negro History 80 (1). Silver Spring, MD. (Winter 1995): 30-41.
Faris, Wendy B. “Sheherazade’s Children: Magical Realism and Postmodern Fiction”. Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, eds. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.
10.2307/j.ctv17vf68f :Faris, Wendy B. Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystiflcation of Narrative. Nashville: Vanderbilt Press, 2004.
10.2307/3178235 :Foreman, P. Grabrielle. “Past-On Stories: History and the Magically Real, Morrison and Allende on Call”. Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, eds. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.
Jones, Edward P. “An Interview with Edward P. Jones”. The Known World. 2003. New York: Amistad, 2004.
Jones, Gayl. Corregidora. 1975. London: Candem Press, 1988.
Marshall, Paule. Praisesong for the Widow. London: Plume, 1983.
10.2307/j.ctv22tnmhk :Morrison, Toni. “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation”. Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation. Mari Evans, ed. Garden City, NY: Anchor-Doubleday, 1984.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. 1987. London: Picador, 1988.
Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. 1977. London: Picador, 1989.
Patton, Sharon F. African-American Art. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Perry, Phyllis. Stigmata. 1998. London: Piatkus, 1999.
Shange, Ntozake. Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo. 1983. London: Minerva, 1996.
Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Translated from the French by Richard Howard. New York: Cornell University Press, 1975.
Walker, Alice. “Everyday Use”. The Complete Stories. London: The Women’s Press, 1994.
Walker, Alice. “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens”. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. London: The Women’s Press, 1984.
Walker, Margaret. Jubilee. 1966. New York: Bantam Books, 1967.
Walker, Margaret. How I Wrote Jubilee and Other essays on Life and Literature. Maryemma Graham, ed. New York: The Feminist Press at The City University of New York, 1990.
Williams, Sherley Anne. Dessa Rose. 1986. London: Women’s Press, 1998.
Willis, Susan. Specifying: Black Women Writing the American Experience. London: Routledge, 1990.
10.1215/9780822397212 :Zamora, Lois Parkinson. “Magical Romance/Magical Realism: Ghosts in U. S. and Latin American Fiction”. Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, eds. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.
Notes de bas de page
1 Todorov, Tzvetan, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Translated from the French by Richard Howard (New York: Cornell University Press, 1975): 41.
2 Perry, Phyllis, Stigmata (1998. London: Piatkus, 1999): 57.
3 Faris, Wendy B., Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystiflcation of Narrative (Nashville: Vanderbilt Press, 2004): 25.
4 Foreman, P. Grabrielle, “Past-On Stories: History and the Magically Real, Morrison and Allende on Call”, in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, eds. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995): 286.
5 The South in contemporary black women’s writing, Susan Willis states, “is never portrayed as even a partial wage-labor economy, even though many Southerners have worked for a wage [...] and a percentage of these have been black. What black women are documenting in the writing is the essential characteristic of the system as a whole as it arose out of slavery [...]. As a non-wage economy, the South is very often depicted as a nonmoney economy” [Specifying: Black Women Writing the American Experience (London: Routledge, 1990): 10-11].
6 In her well-known essay “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens”, Alice Walker points to the importance of quilts as textual evidence of black women’s imagination, which flourished in a creatively adverse soil: “In fanciful, inspired, and yet simple and identifiable figures, it portrays the story of the Crucifixion. [The quilt] is made with bits and pieces of worthless rags, it is obviously the work of powerful imagination and deep spiritual feeling”. “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens”, in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (London: The Women’s Press, 1984): 239.
7 Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) is a good example of how the omniscient narrator works in the narrative as an element of connection, interlacing the necessarily individual experiences of slavery in order to represent the collective African American history, and establishing a continuum between the real and the magic.
8 From Margaret Walker’s Vyry’s marked back, “[t] he scars were webbed and [...] had ridges like a washboard” [Jubilee (1966. New York: Bantam Books, 1967): 406], to the disfigurement of Sherley Anne Williams Dessa’s “loins [which] looked like a mutilated cat face. Scar tissue plowed through her pubic region so that no hair would ever grow there again” [Dessa Rose (1986. London: Women’s Press, 1998): 154], the tree engraved on Sethe’s back described by Paul D in a moment of (com) passion as “the decorative work of an ironsmith too passionate for display” (17) and instants later as “a revolting clump of scars” (21), and Beloved’s “smile under her chin” (275), the scarred body functions as a textual record of slavery.
9 Zamora, Lois Parkinson, “Magical Romance/Magical Realism: Ghosts in U. S. and Latin American Fiction”, in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, eds. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995): 544.
10 In Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystiflcation of Narrative, Wendy B. Faris suggests five primary characteristics of the magical realistic text: “First, the text contains an ‘irreducible element’ of magic; second, the descriptions in magical realism detail a strong presence of the phenomenal world; third, the reader may experience some unsettling doubts in the effort to reconcile two contradictory understandings of events; fourth, the narrative merges different realms; and, finally, magical realism disturbs received ideas about time, space, and identity”, 7. See also Wendy B. Faris’s “Sheherazade’s Children: Magical Realism and Postmodern Fiction”, in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, op. cit.
11 Morrison, Toni, “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation”, in Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation, Mari Evans, ed. (Garden City, NY: Anchor-Doubleday, 1984): 343.
12 Morrison, Toni interviewed by Gail Caldwell, “Author Toni Morrison Discusses Her Latest Novel Beloved”, in Conversations with Toni Morrison, Danille Taylor-Guthrie, ed. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994): 242-243.
13 Jones, Edward P., “An Interview with Edward P. Jones”, in The Known World (2003. New York: Amistad, 2004): 5.
14 The “bit of blue cloth” recalls the “teeny faded blue piece from Great Grandpa Ezra’s uniform that he wore in the Civil War” pieced in a quilt in Alice Walker’s short story “Everyday Use” where quilting is also represented as a means of passing on African America tradition and history, in “Everyday Use”, The Complete Stories (London: The Women’s Press, 1994): 53.
15 Cash, Floris Barnett, “Kinship and Quilting: An Examination of an African-American Tradition”, Journal of Negro History. 80 (1) [Silver Spring, MD. (Winter 1995): 30-41; 30].
16 Patton, Sharon F., African-American Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998): 189.
17 Ferrero, Pat, as quoted by Floris Barnett Cash in “Kinship and Quilting: An Examination of an African-American Tradition”, 32.
18 Morrison, Toni, Beloved (1987. London: Picador, 1988): 210.
19 Shange, Ntozake, Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo (1983. London: Minerva, 1996): 27.
20 Baker, Houston, Jr., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987): 7.
21 Ralph Ellison, as quoted by Sharon F. Patton, in African-American Art, 189.
22 It is interesting to note that the technique of collage which borrows images from a variety of sources varying from paintings, photographs to the media also attempts to blur the distinctions between the real and the unreal, transforming the way the world is perceived. Hence, the collage, like the magical realist text, aims to enlarge the narrative space so that established representations of the world are challenged. See Sharon F. Patton, in African-American Art, 191.
23 It is worth noticing that Ayo’s mother’s hand calling her daughter and encouraging her to begin the journey recalls the hands of other ancestral figures which with their hands call upon their descendants to engage with the past. See below Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow (1983) and Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977).
24 See, for example, pages 7 and 17. “I remember” (7) is later presented as “I choose to remember” (17); “This is for whose bones lay sleepin in the heart of the ocean” (7) is subsequently recorded as “This is for whose bones lay in the heart of the ocean”; the aside (7) is replaced by “beside”.
25 Walker, Margaret, “How I Wrote Jubilee”, in How I Wrote Jubilee and Other Essays on Life and Literature, Maryemma Graham, ed. (New York: The Feminist Press at The City University of New York, 1990): 58.
26 Rushdie, Salman, as quoted by Faris, 144.
Auteur
School of English and Drama, University College Dublin
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