A Lacanian Reading of Milkman

 

by

 

Zhu Yanyan and Wang Quan

 

 Beijing Jiaotong University and Beihang University

 

 

     This paper will focus on the Lacanian scheme of androgyny, which is basically in accordance with the Greek etymology of the term. “The etymological root of this Greek word is comprised of andro, referring to male, and gyn, referring to female. Androgyny, to the Greeks, meant the presence of female and male characteristics in a single organism—hermaphrodite” (Kaplan and Bean 2). To understand Lacan’s concept of androgyny, a prior knowledge of Plato’s idea of androgyny is necessary since Lacan frequently quotes him in his seminars. Aristophanes, in Plato’s “Symposium,” maintains that “Our original nature” is “hermaphrodite [man-woman]” (135). Zeus, for fear of androgynes’ powerful strength and their ambition of attack, has “sliced every one of them into two” (137). And “each of us, then, is but a tally[1] of a man, since every one shows like a flat-fish the traces of having been sliced in two; and each is ever searching for the tally that will fit him” (141). This Platonic missing half has its modern version in the Lacanian concept of “the lack.” Lacan argues that originally, human beings are androgynous in their primordial cells. And sexual differentiation is not realized until the very moment of birth. In Four Fundamental Concepts, Lacan explains this “earlier lack [is] to be situated at the advent of the living being, that is to say, at sexed reproduction” (205). In other words, the original androgynous state of human being has been cut into either a male or female half at the moment of conception. However, this earlier lack—the lost half of sexuality, is not realized until birth.[2] Using the Platonic concept of androgyny to illustrate the Lacanian primordial wholeness, Kaya Silverman has drawn some striking similarities between Plato and Lacan: the human being “derives from an original whole which was divided in half, and that its existence is dominated by the desire to recover its missing complement.” She also attaches equal importance to Lacan’s second assumption—the sexual nature of division: “When it [human being] was ‘sliced’ in half, it lost the sexual androgyny it once had and was reduced to” “either of a man or a woman” (152).

 

The second stage in the Lacanian triad is the Imaginary,[3] in which the infant feels a symbiotic relationship with its surrounding things. This is a pre-Oedipal stage in which the infant has no sense of self yet, or it experiences itself and its mother as an undifferentiated dual unity. For a time after its birth, the infant’s sense of self is the free circulation of libido, or sexual drives, which run in all directions. Describing this free flowing of sexual drives, Lacan makes a very vivid metaphor: “this articulation leads us to make of the manifestation of the drive the mode of a headless subject” (Four Concepts 181). A headless subject bears at least two shades of meaning. One is that the route of the running drives, which is the infant’s felt sense of self at the moment, is headless, blind, or in all different directions. The other interpretation, in Lacan’s term, is “a subjectification without a subject, a bone, a structure, an outline” (184). That is to say, before the mirror stage, the infant has no concept of self, so it can not be called a subject yet. Thus, the infant feels pleasure everywhere in its body from things around itself which are illusionarilly imaged as parts of its body. The concept of self, for the infant at this stage, is precisely expressed by Freud’s term “oceanic self” or Lacan’s “l’hommelett (a human omelette which spreads in all directions)” (Lacan Four Concepts 197), which is “essentially polymorphous, aberrant” (176). 

 

That is to say, the original androgynous tendency has been limited to the realization of sexed reproduction, and thus loses its other half in terms of sexuality. Like an ameba which “survives any division, any scissiparous intervention,” the infant “loses [his completeness] by having to pass, for his reproduction, through the sexual cycle” (Four Concepts 199, 197). This fragmented body, Lacan continues, “usually manifests itself in dreams when the movement of the analysis encounters a certain level of aggressive disintegration in the individual” or “in the form of disjoined limbs” (“Mirror Stage” 736). In addition to “the anatomical incompleteness of the primordial system” referring to the first lack suffered at the moment of birth, the uneven maturation of the infant’s body also explains its experience of “the body-in-bits-and-pieces” and “a primordial Discord betrayed by the signs of uneasiness and motor unco-ordination of the neonatal months” (736). That is, the infant is incapable of fully controlling its bodily movements and behavior, “still sunk in his motor incapacity and nursing dependence” (735). In Grosz’s understanding, “its body is an unco-ordinated aggregate, a series of parts, zones, organs, sensations, needs, and impulses rather than an integrated totality” (Lacan 33). She further points out that “each part strives for its own satisfaction with no concern for the body as a whole” (33-34).

 

Moreover, Lacan emphasizes the privileged position of mother’s body at the Imaginary stage. For Lacan, “the child’s world, …is manufactured out of a container—this would be the body of the mother—and out of the contents of the body of this mother” (“Topic of the Imaginary” 81). Here Lacan playfully employs the full meaning of the French word “contenu” which covers both the English “contents” and “contained.” That is, in the infant’s imagination, he comes out of his mother’s body which is a container in his imagination and at the same time, he is also a part (content) of his mother. And in his primordial fantasy, he craves to be incorporated with the maternal body. “In the course of the development of his instinctual relations with this privileged object, the mother, the child is led into instigating a series of relations of imaginary incorporations” (81). Therefore, “the function of the imaginary primordial enclosure [is] formed by the imago of the mother’s body” (Lacan “Aggressivity” 23). Then, when the infant for the first time sees himself in the mirror, he perceives “him as other than he is.” And this privileged “other,” first of all, becomes his mother, since in the mirror, “he first saw appearing in the form of the parent holding him up before the mirror” (Lacan Four Concepts 257). The blurring concept of self is also vividly expressed in the bracketed (m)other: on the one hand, the infant imagines himself as a fragment of his mother; on the other hand, he also dimly perceives his mother occasional absences which make him regard her as an other. (Grosz 32). In terms of consciousness, this mirror stage is the primordial moment of feeling of his own existence, although still sunk in a non-stable see-saw state.

 

Harassed by this fragmented sense of self, the infant is very happy to meet a Gestalt, a visional whole in the mirror, focused and well coordinated. This significant mirror image of its unified body gives the infant a primordial sense of self. Therefore, Lacan declares, the mirror stage is “an identification,” a “transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image.” This initial phase of consciousness of his social identity, which means “trying to identify with socially expected images,” is ushered into the non-distinct aggregation of disharmonious bodily parts. “The specular I”[4] with “the total form of the body” in the mirror provides “an ideal I” for the infant to identify with since it does not recognize the mirror image as its own. Lacan argues that the self-recognition at this stage is a “meconnnaissance,” a mis-recognition, “a fictional construct” (“Mirror Stage” 737). The mirror image is “an illusory corporeal cohesion, founded on a (mistaken) identification of the child with its visual gestalt in the mirror.” Thus, the ambivalent attitudes towards the mirror image are revealed: “an affairment jubilatoire,” a bliss, because the infant sees a unified totality, a gestalt in the mirror; and “a connaissance paranoiaque,” a frustration, because the infant experiences itself in “a schism, as a site of fragmentation” (Grosz Lacan 32, 40). Succinctly summarizing the point, Terry Eagleton interprets that “the image in the mirror both is and is not itself, a blurring of subject and object still obtains” but “it has begun the process of constructing a center of self” (164). In this way, his consciousness of himself will be constantly reinforced and perpetuated by social expectations permeated in the Symbolic.

 

The idea of self, based on the perceived self as other in the mirror, is reinforced by the spatial concept. Since the formation of the concept of “I” has great similarity between that of an infant and that of an animal, Lacan has borrowed the phenomenon of mimicry to demonstrate the infant’s primordial formation of “I.” In his understanding, the mimicry of animals is to introduce the concept of space and to show their differentiation from the surrounding environment, rather than to protect themselves in order to survive in nature. Thus, by means of showing their difference from the surrounding environment, animals have formed a concept of self. “But the facts of mimicry are no less instructive when conceived as cases of heteromorphic identification, in as mush as they raise the problem of the signification of space for the living organism[…]” (“Mirror Stage” 735-736). The real purpose of mimicry, in Lacan’s view, is that “we must attribute it to some formative power of the very organism that shows us its manifestations” (“The Eye” 73). Therefore, the spatial concept presented by mirror image is the initial effort to facilitate the infant to differentiate itself from its symbiotic relationship with everything surrounding it. “The mirror-stage produces the ‘spatial intuition’ which is found at the heart of the function of signification” (Kristeva Revolution 41).

 

Furthermore, Lacan has compared the Imaginary to be illogical dreams. The Lacanian Imaginary, like the Kristevian concept of the semiotic, has a totally different logic from that of the Symbolic: illogical, unreasonable. Staying in the world of the Imaginary, “one gets the feeling that a passage into a kind of a-logic occurs.” To further illuminate on this order, Lacan continues, “yet the logos doesn’t forego all its rights here, since that’s where the essential meaning of the dream, its liberating meaning, begins” (“Odd or Even?” 177). In other words, the commonly assumed grammar, logic, reason, hierarchy in the Symbolic, are totally twisted and reshuffled in a disorderly, chaotic world of the Imaginary, a total reversal

 

This multiple and illogical dimension, as is illustrated in the Primary Process, is also demonstrated in the infant’s babbling, contrary to the “ordered, regulated, and rule-governed signification” (Grosz Lacan 151).  This heterogeneousness in the semiotic, for Kristeva, is epitomized in “the first echolalias of infants as rhythms and intonations anterior to the first phonemes, morphemes, lexemes and sentence” (Desire in Language 133). As Raman Selden explains it, “The utterance which most approximates to a semiotic discourse is the pre-Oedipal ‘babble’ of the child” (142). Against the linear logic of coherence in male language—“reason, logic, grammar, syntax, univocal meanings” (Grosz Sexual Subversions 49), the nonsense babbling of infants exemplifies female discourse: noncentered, incoherent, multiple and fluid—a reversal of the Symbolic Order represented by language. In other words, “a rhythmic babble which bonds mother with child” is the “native language of the maternal Imaginary” (Ruthven 98), and “the representation of hitherto unspeakable or unintelligible phenomena, instances on the borders of the meaningful” (Grosz Lacan 153).

In the maternal world of the Imaginary, the gendered roles played in the Symbolic are reversed. In an infant’s imaginary world, his mother, no longer weak and submissive, becomes a powerful and dominant “Phallic Mother.” However, when he enters the Symbolic stage, the infant gradually perceives his mother’s powerlessness in terms of her subordinate relation to the father and thus the mother is slowly losing her power signaled by phallus. “We should concern ourselves not only with the way in which the mother accommodates herself to the person of the father, but also with the way she takes his speech, the word let us say, of his authority, in other words, in the place that she reserves for the Name-of-the-Father in the promulgation of the Law” (Lacan 218). Therefore at the Imaginary stage, with father’s frequent absence, “the mother is designated from her position as the all-powerful phallic mother” (Grosz Lacan 70). Closely related with this point is the infant’s fancy of “a detachable penis” of his mother. Grosz writes, “the penis becomes regarded as a ‘detachable’ organ, along the lines of the fantasy of the body in bits-in-pieces. The detachable penis, the penis that the mother once had, prefigures the function of the phallus” (117). In other words, the mother in possession of this power symbol (phallus) becomes phallic at the Imaginary stage. Before such a “totalizing and phallic Mother—Goddess,” man, or rather the boy infant, is “feminized,” very much attached to and dependent on his powerful mother at the Imaginary stage.

 

With the acquisition of language, the child has been introduced into the Symbolic where he/she has learned the different gender roles. “The difference between male and female entry into the Symbolic has to do with the stage of development which overlaps the full acquisition of language, and through which the child accepts his or her gender identity—the oedipal phase” (Kaplan 233).  That is to say, the child learns his/her socially expected gender roles. For example, by repressing his desire for his mother, the son has made a pact with his father, in exchange for the delayed promise of his own future woman. That is, the son has identified himself with his father and taken on his father’s attributes (Freud “The Dissolution” 173-179). Unlike the son who puts himself on the position of the powerful and positive father, the daughter, after her discovery of her mother’s castration, has to accept “her socially designated role as subordinated to the possessor of the phallus, and through her acceptance, she comes to occupy the passive, dependent position expected of women in patriarchy” (Grosz Lacan 69).

 

In short, human beings are androgynous in tendency, but this tendency is often suppressed by social and cultural codes, which allow us only to show one side of androgynous qualities: to be either masculine or feminine. The either/or logic of male or female consciousness is a double-edged sword to individuals, and to be a complete and full human being, the both/and logic of androgyny, for Toni Morrison, seems to be an ideal solution to help free human personality from the prison of sex-role stereotyping. Milkman is such an epitome, who has undergone the Symbolic to the Imaginary and finally reached the androgynous state.

 

At the Symbolic stage, Milkman lives up to the masculine criteria in Song of Solomon (Part One). Protecting the weak sex is a masculine gesture. In her analysis of American society in the 1970s, Margaret Mead finds that the female is defined as “helpless, in need of protection, especially of support” (276). Jack Nichols also comes to the same conclusion: sympathetic with the womanly images of “helplessness and the need to be taken care of,” “men carry around with them an often heavy responsibility: to protect and make life easy for their defenseless ‘little chicks’” (223). No longer withstanding his father’s severe beating of his mother, Milkman has knocked his father “into the radiator” (67) because in his line of thinking, protecting the weaker sex is the obligation of a man. “He [Milkman] was a man who saw another man hit a helpless person ” (75). And “it was her vaporishness that made her more needful of defense” (75). In fact, Milkman’s idea of women also echoes Lawrence Stone’s point about English women in history. Women, as the weaker vessel, can be chastised, but can not be beaten beyond the point of education, and they must be modestly used because of the fact that “a woman is the weaker vessel, of a frail heart, inconstant, and with a word soon stirred to wrath” (138).

 

Moreover, Milkman, in his powerful masculine position, has turned Hagar into a sexual commodity. In capitalist society, modern industrial production turns every worker into a commodity. Carl Marx states in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, “the worker sinks to the level of a commodity and becomes indeed the most wretched of commodities” since “labour produces not only commodities; it produces itself and worker as a commodity” (71). Moreover, it is Marx who emphatically points out the commodification of woman by man, “Even the species-relation itself, the relation between man and woman, becomes an object of commerce. Woman is bartered away” (On Jewish Question 51).

 

A man’s power and superior position in patriarchal society enable him to reify woman into a commodity, a thing that can be bought and sold. Treating Hagar as a dependent commodity, Milkman “pays” for his sexual pleasure. The use-value of a commodity is its utility; that is to say, “a commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another.” Marx further remarks, “the nature of such wants, whether, for instance, then spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference” (Capital vol. I 303). As far as the commodity of woman is concerned, one of the use-values refers to the sexual pleasure to satisfy the male erotic desire. After sleeping with Hagar for many years, Milkman “was getting tired of her” because she becomes “the third beer” which no longer satisfies his sexual appetite, or her use value of providing sexual pleasure for her consumer is used up: “She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it’s there, because it can’t hurt, and because what difference does it make?” (91). Obviously, the only value of Hagar, in Milkman’s eyes, is to satisfy his sexual appetites. If this commodity no longer interests the customer, he will refuse to pay for it. Moreover, the value of a commodity, according to Marx, is expressed in its price. If something is free, it almost suggests its valuelessness. Motivated by the commercial principle “the higher the price the better the commodity,” Milkman sees no value in Hagar because of her generous offer to him. “Her eccentricities [which] were no longer provocative and the stupefying ease with which he had gotten and stayed between her legs” make him think that “he didn’t even have to pay for it. It was so free, so abundant, it had lost its fervor” (91).

 

Milkman has internalized the consumerism in which “we can never rest secure in our possessions: something new and better is always being sold, and others may purchase something we don’t have, in which case they will be ‘better’ than we are” (Tyson 68), so he wants to buy more commodities to satisfy and diversify his sexual pleasure. Hagar “was considered his private honey pot, not a real or legitimate girl friend—not someone he might marry,” for Milkman “found himself effortlessly popular with girls of his own age and in his own neighborhood” (91). Like his friend Guitar who has “never kept a woman more than a few months—the time span that he said was average before she began to make ‘permanent-arrangement-type noises’” (107), Milkman, with all his money, can reify women to satisfy his sexual appetites without distinguishing their individuality. “You got that red-head bitch and you got a Southside bitch and no telling what in between” (103). All these women, for Milkman, seem to have no personality, for they are nothing but the embodiment of sexual service provided to their customers. A few days later, Hagar has “the sight of Milkman’s arms around the shoulders of a girl” (127).

 

Since he regards Hagar as a commodity, “a thing which he can ‘own’ or ‘dispose of’ like the various objects of the external world” (Lukacs 100), Milkman must pay for her sexual service. “He went into a department store and selected” presents for Hagar. “A costume jewelry” or “a Timex” or “watches?” Milkman could not decide what to buy. How much should he pay her? “The commodity character of the commodity, the abstract, quantitative mode of calculability must be measured in terms of currency” (Lukacs 93). Rather than buying presents for Hagar, “instead he [Milkman] would give her a nice piece of money” (98). “He went back to his father’s office, got some cash out of the safe, and wrote Hagar a nice letter which ended: ‘Also I want to thank you. […] For making me happy all these years. I am signing this letter with love, …” (99). With the disguised mask of love, Hagar is reified into a commodity which could be measured in terms of money.

 

Dissatisfactory with his life at the Symbolic stage, Milkman starts his journey and enters the Imaginary where he has experienced reversed gender roles. “Never, not since he knelt by his window sill wishing he could fly, had he felt so lonely. He saw the eyes of a child peer at him over the sill of the one second-story window the ivy had not covered. He smiled. Must be myself I’m seeing—thinking about how I used to watch the sky out the window” (238). Milkman’s looking at himself in the child approximates the Lacanian concept of mirror image. The infant, according to Lacan, owning to his fragmented sense of self, is happy to identify with a well-coordinated and focused image in the mirror which is his ideal; but at same time he is paranoiac to see this beautifully shaped “other” since he still feels himself in “bits—and—pieces.” At the mirror stage, on the one hand, “a certain level of tendencies which are experienced—as disconnected, discordant, in pieces—and on the other hand, a unity with which it is merged and paired. It is in this unity that the subject for the first time knows himself as unity, but as an alienated, virtual unity” (Lacan “A Materialist Definition” 50). In other words, at this critical moment of the mirror stage, the infant is developing a blurring concept of self based on the image which he perceives as other. This ambiguous self/other relationship without a clear-cut division is vividly portrayed in the text: “must be myself I’m seeing” (238), and at the same time he is very happy to identify himself with the image in another child, “he smiled” (238).

 

The communication between the mother and infant is the incomprehensible “echolalias” “as rhythms and intonations anterior to the first phonemes, morphemes, lexemes, and sentences” (Desire in Language 133). Milkman has entered a dark and huge womb-like house. Then he has baby dreams, as if he had been dragged back into his infant-hood, “dreams of the witch who chased him down dark alley.” Very soon he finds Circe the mother figure. “Her [Circe] head came to his chest and the feel of that hair under his chin, the dry bony hands like steel springs rubbing his back, her floppy mouth babbling into his vest, made him dizzy” (239). As a mother coaxes a baby into sleep with her lullaby, Circe the mother figure, speaking in the infant’s “language,” communicates with her baby in babbling, a female discourse. “She took his hand in both of hers, and he followed her—his arm outstretched, his hand in hers—like a small boy being dragged reluctantly to bed” (240). At the Imaginary stage, the infant has not learned language yet and it only talks in the nonsense sounds, incapable of conveying any fixed and clear meaning. Nonetheless, the mother can understand these illogical, meaningless, and even-contradictory syllables that the infant utters. Therefore, this special language communicated between mother and infant[5], totally different from language in the Symbolic which is linear, logical and orderly, is called women’s language, as is expressed by K. K. Ruthven, “a rhythmic babble which bonds mother with child and which might well be considered the matrix of a supposed women’s language” (98).

 

As is discussed before, Lacan has compared the Imaginary to the primary process—the illogical world of dreams. In dreamland, the usual hierarchical system of orders has disappeared and everything in a dream becomes equal, or free of hierarchy. “This is the world of the child,…in which high is equivalent to low, the back is equivalent to the front, etc. Universal equivalence is the law of this world, and it is even this that leaves us sufficiently uncertain whether any structure in it can be pinned down” (Lacan “The Hysteric’s Question” 165). Milkman’s encounter with Circe is saturated with illogic dreams. “He had had dreams as a child, dreams every child had” (248). And “Milkman closed his eyes, helpless to pull away before the completion of the dream” (248). In the irrational dreamland, Milkman is futile in his laborious efforts to come to reason: “Milkman struggled for a clear thought, so hard to come by in a dream. Perhaps this woman is Circe. But Circe is dead” (240). Thus “quite baffling to waking thought” (Silverman 61), Milkman finds the most astonishing thing—an old widow of more than a hundred years old could speak in a young girl’s voice, “out of the toothless mouth came the strong, mellifluent voice of a twenty-year-old girl” (241). Struggling with this incomprehensible phenomenon, Milkman, like an infant, could no longer believe his own sense of hearing, “maybe something was happening to his ears” (241). In this baffling dream world, logic does not work any longer. “Milkman wanted to hear the sound of his own voice, so he decided to take a chance on logic” (241). But he only finds that things in the logical conscious world whose significance is strenuously emphasized are “relegated to obscure corners” (Silverman 61). For instance, the significant distinction of age becomes non-differentiated in this dream world. Milkman thinks that mentioning his father’s age could “clear things up,” but he finds that “all she said was ‘Uhn,’ as though seventy-two, thirty-two, any age at all, meant nothing whatsoever to her” (241). In the world of the Imaginary, the patriarchal hierarchy does not work any longer, and all the distinctions disappear, for “universal equivalence is the law of this world” (“The Hysteric’s Question” 165).

 

At this Imaginary stage, Milkman is feminized and weakened, demonstrating his newly acquired feminine qualities. According to Nancy Chodorow, unlike a boy who tries to separate himself from the pre-oedipal symbiotic relation with his mother and tries to establish his “greater sense of rigid ego boundaries and differentiation,” a girl endeavors to keep her pre-oedipal relationship with her mother. Thus Chodorow concludes, “feminine personality comes to be based” “more on retention and continuity of external relationships” (169) and “girls emerge with a stronger basis for experiencing another’s needs of feelings as one’s own” (167). Contrary to the symbolic stage at which Milkman has never “cared whether Corinthians stood up or fell down,” and “never asked one of us [his sisters] if we were tired, or sad, or wanted a cup of coffee” (215), Milkman at this Imaginary stage, full of tender love and considerations for others, comes to experience others’ troubles and needs. Moved by Circe’s story, “Milkman felt a flood of pity and thought gratitude made her smile at him” (246). Overwhelmed by emotions and subject to the impact of sensations from outside world, Milkman has offered his sympathetic assistance to the old poor widow, “you should leave this place. Sell the damn dogs. I’ll help you. You need money? How much?” (246) Milkman’s consideration for others’ trouble, in the light of Chodorow’s concept of empathy, is a feminine trait because “empathy [is] built into their [girls’] primary definition of self in a way that boys do not,” and “feminine personality comes to include a fundamental definition of self in relationship” and in “connectedness” (169).

 

Finally, Milkman has reached the ideal state of androgyny. His staying in the cave suggests the androgynous state of an infant in mother’s womb. After wading across the creek, Milkman is about to enter the cave. However, a very significant episode occurs: his watch stops working, as is noted by Jan Furman, “his ‘heavy over-designed’ watch is splintered, the minute hand broken, as if to signal an eruption” (37). But, Furman’s point is to illustrate that Milkman’s journey is “less heroic and more human” by making him “come face to face with his limitations” when all modern facilities are deprived away (37). In other words, Furman thinks that the broken watch is Milkman’s symbolic farewell to modern civilization and at the same time it is a starting point to refashion his new self in a primitive forest. The first critic who links the watch with the linear concept of time, in this episode, is Linden Peach. “The loss of the watch is especially significant because Milkman loses the western concept of time which is essentially linear as opposed to a traditional African concept of time which is cyclical” (Toni Morrison 60). Agreeing with the association of the watch with linear time, this paper would interpret the episode in terms of gender: women’s cyclical time. “He [Milkman] looked at his watch to check time. It ticked, but the face was splintered and the minute hand was bent” (250). Defining the male nature of the linear, teleological historical time, as is measured by a watch, Kristeva informs us, father’s temporality is “time as project, teleology, linear and prospective unfolding; time as departure, progression, and arrival—in other words, the time of history.” This kind of temporality is often demonstrated in the linear time of “language considered as the enunciation of sentences (noun+verb; topic—comment; beginning—ending)” and “is inherent in the logical and ontological values of any given civilization” (Kristeva “Women’s Time” 473).  As for women, “one thinks more of the space generating and forming the human species than of time, becoming, or history” (472).

 

Woman, the receptacle and space, is synonymous with the nourishing maternal chora. Their time, “cyclical and monumental,” if it can be called time, is a space.[6] Woman’s time, is “all encompassing and infinite like imaginary space” in which “there are cycles, gestation, the eternal recurrence of a biological rhythm which conforms to that of nature” (472-3). Milkman, after his watch stops, sees “a black hole in the rock which he could get to by a difficult, but no dangerous climb” (250), and in a few minutes, “he stood up, finally, on the level ground twenty feet to the right of the mouth of the cave” (251). Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams explains that any container in dreams can be interpreted as the symbol of female genitals. “Boxes, cases, chests, cupboards and ovens represent the uterus, and also hollow objects, ships and vessels of all kinds” (354). In light of Freudian interpretation, the “black hole in the rock” and “the cave” carved into the mountain, suggest a maternal womb, in which Milkman’s logical thinking gives way to his semiotic rhythms in the maternal chora. “He left off thinking and let his body do the work.” “It caused paralysis, trembling, dry throats and sweaty palms” (251). Barbara Rigney also reads the cave as a symbolic womb, “the space of the mother.” Besides, she interprets Milkman’s “long awww sound” in the cave as “the birth cry, the primal scream that represents pain” (14). Enlightened by Rigney’s semiotic reading of the scene, I would argue for the androgynous state of Milkman.

 

Milkman “entered the cave and was blinded by the absence of light” (251). According to Lacan, at the moment of sexual differentiation, “the advent of the living being, that is to say, at sexed reproduction” (Four Concepts 250-1), the infant suffers the first lack from being a primordial whole. But the lack is not realized until the moment of birth, so the infant in the womb is symbolic of the androgynous tendency of the human being. Milkman, in the dark cave, is feeling his way. His moving back and forth, up and down, slowly but regularly, resembles the rhythmic movements of the fetus’ quickening in mother’s womb. “Raising it up and down, and pressing it back and around, he could tell that he had found the pit” (Song of Solomon 252). Moreover, the fetus image is reinforced by his bodily posture. Staying in the pit, Milkman curls himself into a crawling posture which approximates a fetal position: “he swallowed and dropped to his knees.” “At the bottom of the hole,” “stretched out on his stomach, holding the lighter in one hand, he swept the bottom with the other, clawing, pulling, fingering, poking” (252). Furthermore, the spasm of bodily movements is dubbed with a voiceless tune. “Milkman’s feet were singing, the tender skin of the ball louder than the heels. He dared not spread his toes, lest the singing never stop” (254). Note the description of his skin: tender—a thirty-one-year-old man has curiously possessed tender skin which is often associated with infants. The fact that “he squinted his eyes as hard as he could, but he couldn’t see a thing” (252) also provokes the associations of the unopened eyes of the infant in the mother’s dark womb, “the absence of light” (251). This image of an infant in the womb is further reinforced by the fact that “Milkman was already wet” (249), which resembles the infant’s swimming in the womb water.

 

If the cave imagery makes Milkman’s tendency towards androgyny, his subsequent androgynous behavior actually reinforces this tendency: his attraction to and gradual understanding of children’s nonsense sounds (feminine) and his manly fighting with the local men in defending his masculine reputation (masculine). First, the female traits of Milkman’s androgynous state are illustrated by the children’s song towards the end of the novel. “Behind him the children were singing a kind of ring-around-the-rose or Little Sally Walker game” (264).

 

Jake the only son of Solomon

Come booba yalle, come booba tambee

Whirled about and touched the sun

Come konka yalle, come konka tambee

 

Let that baby in a white man’s house

Come booba yalle, come booba tambee

Heddy took him to a red man’s house

Come konka yalle, come konka tambee

 

Black lady fell down on the ground

Come booba yalle, come booba tambee

Threw her body all around

Come konka yalle, come konka tambee

 

Solomon and Ryna Belali Shalut

Yaruba Medina Muhammet too

Nestor Kalina Saraka cake

Twenty-one children, the last one Jake

(264) (303)

 

In the Lacanian Imaginary, these nonsense syllables are a female voice from the “wild zone,” for Kristeva defies the paternal symbolic order as a site “where legislators, grammarians, and even psychoanalysts have their seat” (Desire 242). Contrary to the logical, clear and well-defined meaning in the symbolic, this woman’s language, as a powerful alternative discourse, is full of “contradictions, meaninglessness, disruption, silences and absences” (Toi 162). In deciphering the language employed in the above passage, W. Kimberly Benston reveals, it encompasses “Kikongo and Greek, the Islamic and the Judaic, West Africa and Cuba, priestly exile and burning love within the mother’s home, biblical fable and Morrison’s own family biography.”  For such a fabric of various sources of discourse is totally beyond our comprehension. “The song of Solomon clearly eludes any completed reading, any certain ‘translation,’ in its active interweaving of temporal, spatial, and discursive codes,” reverberating with the incomprehensible nonsense babbling of infants in the Imaginary (Benston 104). “ ‘Come booba yalle, come booba tambee,’ it sounds like, and didn’t make sense” and just one line after, “there was another string of nonsense words.” “Now the child in the center began whirling, spinning to lyrics sung in a different faster tempo: ‘Solomon and Ryna Belali Shalut…’” (302). Unintelligible to a masculine mind who is saturated with reason, logic and law, “her language” is an incomprehensible site for man, in which “she goes off in all directions and in which ‘he’ is unable to discern the coherence of any meaning. Contrary words seem a little crazy to the logic and reason, and inaudible for him who listens with ready-male grids, a code prepared in advance” (Irigaray “This Sex” 1469). Kristeva also characterizes this female discourse, “indifferent to language, enigmatic and feminine, this space underling the written is rhythmic, unfettered, irreducible to its intelligible verbal translation; it is musical, anterior to judgement” (Revolution 38). Rhythmic bodily gestures, owing to the infant’s lack of language, are an indispensable part of the semiotic and an alternative way of expression in Song of Solomon. “A boy in the middle, his arms outstretched, turned around like an airplane, while the others sang some meaningless rhyme” (264). More significantly, rather than the linguistic sign, it is the combination of meaningless syllables and the children’s bodily gestures that convey the mood of their game. “They went on with several verses, the boy in the middle doing his imitation of an airplane.” Closely linked with bodily gestures are the meaningless sounds unuttered by children. “The climax of the game was a rapid shouting of nonsense words accompanied by more rapid twirling: ‘Solomon rye balaly shoo; yaraba medina hamlet too’—until the last line. ‘Twenty-one children the last one Jay!’ ” Then again the nonsense syllables are immediately followed by gestures. “At which point the boy crashed to earth and the others screamed” (265).

 

Anterior to sign and syntax which are the constitutional elements of language, the rhymthical and intonational vocal modulation predominates in the song. Closely linked with the rhythm is repetition, which Kristeva argues, “articulates the units of a particular rhythm or intonation” (Desire 133). Thus in the song, the repeated refrains, “Come booba yalle, come booba tambee” and “come konka yalle, come konka tambee”  are not yet meaningful sentences and incapable of signifying anything, rather they emphasize the semiotic dimensions—the musical and rhythmical effects.

The semiotic, even after the child’s master of language, does not fade out; instead it is repressed by the symbolic, ready to disrupt and return. A poet, who can write in the semiotic, is like “an anamnestic child [who] finds his phallic mother again” (Desire 196). With the acquisition of language, the child has entered the Symbolic and learns the appropriate gender roles. And the primordial memory of the powerful phallic mother is fading out of his memory, and only leaves a few sporadic traces. However, poets and painters have privileged accesses to this lost world of the Imaginary. “The semiotic draws upon a sort of corporeal memory to which psychoanalysis commonly refers as ‘mnemonic traces,’” as Anne-Marie Smith states, and the semiotic is “the memory, the inscription of this state [pre-Oedipal] in language” (16). In other words, the Semiotic is often understood as the refreshing of the lost memory experienced in the pre-Oedipal mother-infant oneness. Deeply attracted by children’s nonsense song, “Milkman took out his wallet and pulled from it his airplane ticket stub, but he had no pencil to write with, and his pen was in his suit” (303). Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in their famous opening of The Madwoman in the Attic, interrogates, “Is a pen a metaphorical penis?” (3). John Irwin provides his affirmative answer: writing is “a kind of creative onanism in which through the use of the phallic pen on the ‘pure space’ of the virgin page, the self is continually spent and wasted […]” (Quoted in Gilbert 6). Very significantly, this meaningless song full of semiotic dimensions is not transcribed by “a metaphorical penis,” but is registered by Milkman’s memory, as if “the anamnestic child” had recuperated his pre-Oedipal memory in which he was communicating with his mother in nonsense babbling. “He would just have to listen and memorize it. He closed his eyes and concentrated while the children, inexhaustible in their willingness to repeat a rhythmic, rhyming action game, performed the round over and over again. And Milkman memorized all of what they sang” (303).  Fascinated by the children’s song, Milkman feels that “his scalp began to tingle” (302). Moreover, his confusion about the song gradually comes to light. “These children were singing a story about his own people! He hummed and chuckled as he did his best to put it all together” (304).

 

Contrasted with the children’s nonsense song that helps to characterize Milkman’s female traits is his masculine initiation into fighting. The sight of the children playing the game reminds him of his own childhood when he learnt the first fighting lesson from Guitar. “Milkman smiled, remembering how Guitar grinned and whooped as the four boys turned on him. It was the first time Milkman saw anybody really enjoy a fight” (264). Immediately following this memory of childhood violence is adult Milkman’s direct confrontation with local men. Apart from Milkman’s unintentional challenging of their honor codes, the most important reason leading to the fighting is their hurt sense of manhood. Morrison also comments that “men identify with their ability to work and take care of the people they are responsible for” (Conversations 113). But Milkman’s money makes the local men feel that their masculinity is slandered as if they depended on their women for a living. Therefore, from Milkman’s manners and clothes, the local men assume that: “he was telling them that they weren’t men, that they relied on women and children for their food” (266).

 

Moreover, Milkman’s desire for their women is another severe offense to them since their women are their “goods and chattels” (Fletcher 108), as is pointed out by Trudier Harris: “his [Milkman’s] easy survey of their women threatens the fragile bonds they can still use to claim their manhood” (99). “He [Milkmsn] wanted one of them [local wives] bad. To curl up in a cot in that one’s arms, or that one, or that” (Song of Solomon 263). This is further confirmed by the fighting men. “Why would anybody want to stay there if they ain’t no big money?” “The sights and the women” (267).

At last, the insult moves to the core issue of masculinity—sexual prowess. Correctly pointing out that the local men “focus their first test of his sexual capacity—is he as much as a man in the sexual matters as the signs suggest,” Trudier Harris thinks that they want to mock homosexuality and sexual perversion of Northern people (99). This paper argues that their verbal contest about their sexual prowess, as the indicator of their masculinity, implies the feminine inferiority of local men which is the most offensive insult on their manhood. “For the most part, one finds in Occidental sexuality nothing more than imperatives dictated by rivalry among males: the ‘strongest’ being the one who ‘gets it up the most,’ who has the longest, thickest, hardest penis or indeed the one who ‘pisses the farthest’ (cf. Little boys’ game)” (Irigaray “This Sex” 1468). In light of this interpretation, the very topic of the rivalry confrontation between Milkman and the local men is about the size and erection of the penis. “Maybe the pricks is different.” The first man spoke again. /“Reckon?” asked the second man. /“So I hear tell,” said the first man. /“How different?” asked the second man. /“Wee little,” said the first man. “Wee, wee little”      (267). The little penis, judged by the standard of “the penis as epitome of masculinity” and “the biggest size the most masculine,” indicate their unmanly qualities (Koedt 147-9). Their little penises are further contrasted with the bigger ones of Northern people of whom Milkman is one. “ ‘So they tell me. That’s why they pants so tight. That true?’ The first man looked at Milkman for an answer” (267). Since penis size is a critical measure of one’s masculinity, “‘bigger is better’ becomes American men’s preoccupation” (Nichols 166). More satirical than that, Milkman unconsciously compares himself to the penetrating penis and the local men to the penetrated vagina—an unforgivable insult on their masculinity. Opposite to the penetrating penis, woman in patriarchal culture are considered as a receptacle, to “be occupied,” “to be possessed” (Foyster 73), and “ ‘the home’ it offers the male penis” (Irigaray “This Sex” 1467). “Once,” said Milkman. “When a little young nigger made me mad and I had to jam a Coke bottle up his ass.” /“What’d you use a bottle for? Your cock wouldn’t fill it?” /“It did. After I took the Coke bottle out. Filled his mouth too.” /“Prefer mouth, do you?” (267). In this homosexual scene, Milkman, identifying himself with the active masculinity, puts his penis in the mouth of “a little young nigger,” who, in sexual politics, is reduced to the inferior status of woman, a hole to be filled by a penis.[7] Therefore, the local men in this confrontation are reduced to the feminine status of the “little young nigger,” as is acknowledged by the leading fighting man, “That’s [the little young nigger] me, motherfucker” (268).

 

Facing with such an unforgivable insult on their manhood, these men find that “within a culture which associated manhood with physical strength, being able to defend one’s honour with men’s fists was important. Refusal to fight could render a man open to mockery and insult” and fighting, as “an effective response to insult, an opportunity to reassert manhood publicly” (Foyster 178), is developing gradually as their talk is orienting towards the rivalry between masculine sexuality. “The knife glittered.” “Milkman made his voice pleasant, but he knew something was developing” (267). No longer like his timid childhood behavior, Milkman confronts the battle directly and squarely, “I ain’t seen those since I was fourteen. Where I came from boys play with knives—if they scared they gonna lose, that is” (267-8). His masculinity is clearly expressed in his brave fighting. “Milkman did his best he could with a broken bottle, but his face got slit, so did his left hand, and so did his pretty beige suit” (268). When Saul, the headman, in the fighting is pulled away, and all the fighters retreated, “Milkman hurled the broken bottle into a corner” (268). His brave confrontation of and final survival of the fighting have proved his manhood and directed the first step towards acceptance by the local men. “If he [Milkman] can hold on his own and somehow survive their insults, then they will tolerate him, perhaps even accept him into the community,” regarding him as a man in their own definition (Harris 99).

Milkman’s androgyny is further illustrated in his masculine hunting where he also experiences the pre-linguistic semiotic sounds. Hunting, in primitive society, was an exclusive masculine activity, and women, owing to their fragile physical constitution and encumbrance of child-caring, were restricted to food-gathering (Lerner 41). Stemmed from this primitive division of labor, hunting has always had an overwhelming masculine tone and become a touchstone of manhood. Therefore, Milkman’s participation in hunting in fact is a test of his masculinity. Following the young men’s test of Milkman’s masculinity in the form of fighting is the old men’s hunting invitation, a different way to try out his manhood. “No knives either, or hot breath and knotted neck muscles. They [old local men] would test him, match and beat him, probably, on some other ground” (269). And this “some other ground” is hunting: “Some of us is going huntin later on. Care to join us?” (269), for “unless he was a hunter, no young person was allowed to be possessed of manhood and gallantry” (Fletcher 133). Conscious of the point, Milkman has to accept this challenge; otherwise his manhood reputation would be jeopardized, “Sure I’m coming. Just get me the gun” (269).

 

A direct confrontation of difficulties and dangers, as an indispensable part of hunting, is a necessary training for a man. Milkman has decided to go hunting although he has the opportunity to stay away from it. In fact the painful experience in night hunting really stretches Milkman’s masculine capacity of endurance. Walking in the forest under cover of the night, Milkman feels that he is traveling his longest odyssey. Exhausted as he is, Milkman does not give up his trek. “It was the longest trek Milkman had ever made in his life” (274). Following closely behind Calvin saves Milkman the trouble of pushing away the branches and of finding a path in the woods. But now Milkman has been lagged much behind: “he had to push the branches away from his face himself. The doubling down and under branches and pushing things out of his way were as exhausting as the walk” (275). The painful experience is further revealed, “he could feel the blood pulsing in his temple and the cut on his face stinging in the night wind from the leaf juice and tree sap the branches had smeared on it” (275). For Morrison, endurance of hardship and pain is a “stoic gesture of manliness” (Playing in the Dark 75). Despite long hours of weary walking, Milkman still lives up to the masculine codes that “men should learn fortitude and courage” (Fletcher 307).

 

Apart from the physical endurance of hardship involved in hunting, another very important element is hunting skills. Hunting, which is “believed to include courage and resourcefulness,” has become “the supreme test of his [hunter’s] skill” (Fletcher 327). Shooting, as the most important hunting skill, is a “very manly thing” (Foyster 36). The first verbal exchange between Milkman and the experienced hunters is about the shooting skills, prevailing a competitive overtone. “You pretty good with a bottle. How about you with a shotgun?” Although Milkman “had never handled a fireman in his life” (270-1), he knows shooting, as an emblem of masculinity, is a “very manly thing” and thus answers that he is the “best shot there is” (269). When Milkman accepts the hunting invitation, he emphatically stresses “just get me the gun” (265). The frequent associations between Milkman and guns also suggest this point. “They opened some Falstaff beer and began to talk about guns. At which point the revelry mixed with meanness abated and King Walker handed Milkman his Winchester .22” (271). “Milkman did as he was told and took King’s shotgun” (272). In fact, Milkman proves his own masculinity by protecting his own life with the gun. When Milkman’s throat is fastened around by a wire, “Milkman grabbed the Winchester at his side, cocked it, and pulled the trigger, shooting into the trees in front of him” (279). It is this timely shooting that has saved his life. “The blast startled Guitar, and the wire slipped again.” Then “he turned the shotgun backward as far as he could and managed awkwardly, to pull the trigger again.” This second firing has guaranteed his safety. “The wire dropped and he heard Guitar breaking into a fast run through the trees” (279).

 

The final procedure of hunting is their ceremonial celebration: eating their hunted trophy. Like an apprentice who has proved his eligible qualifications of being conferred upon the title of knight after his performance in the battle-ground of tournament, Milkman, after “a tribal hunting ritual,” “comes into his black manhood” (Bouson 98). Thus, Milkman has passed their masculine examination of hunting and has been accepted as a full-fledged member of the group.

 

Interesting enough, during the masculine process of hunting, Milkman has also experienced his symbiotic relationships with the surrounding environments at the infant’s Imaginary stage. The infant, in its imaginary world, experiences no recognized boundaries. Instead of having a concept of self, the infant believes itself is “a fragment of something larger and more primordial” (Silverman 153), forming a symbiotic or undifferentiated relationship with everything in the surrounding environment. And Freud also thinks, “the ego is first and foremost a bodily ego,” “a projection of surface.”[8] Rigney, in her reading of Beloved, argues that the falling of body parts suggests the melting of one’s distinctive identity.[9] But this paper has a slightly different argument: the melting of identity, but the merging, not with mother, as is discussed by Rigney, but with the surrounding things. Roger Caillois, whom Lacan quotes to shed light on the symbiotic relationship between the infant and its surrounding environment, argues that mimicry threatens to assimilate the individual into its environment. “The feeling of personality considered as the organism’s feeling of distinction from its surroundings, of the connections between consciousness and a particular point in space, cannot fail under these conditions [mimicry] to be seriously undermined.”[10] Implying in those quoted words, Lacan suggests that it is the mirror image that provides the infant with the initial perception of spatial difference, and makes the infant, for the first time in the history of the subject in his/her life, be aware of the concept of “other” beyond its symbiotic entanglement with the surrounding environment. Sinking into this non-differentiating semiotic world, Milkman has mysteriously lost his discernment to distinguish difference. “Eyes, ears, nose, taste, touch—and some other sense that he knew he did not have: an ability to separate out, of all the things there were to sense, the one that life itself might depend on” (277). There, Milkman conveys to the reader a sense of detachment from all his bodily senses—sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. This suggests Milkman’s loss of control over these body parts at that moment. Thus, it somehow indicates some degree of frustration experienced by an infant in the Imaginary in its bits-and-pieces consciousness. Moreover, as is expressed by Caillois, Milkman begins the disintegration of his body parts and loses his sense of self. “His self—the cocoon that was ‘personality’—gave way. He could barely see his own hand, and couldn’t see his feet. He was only his breath, coming slower now, and his thoughts. The rest of him had disappeared” (277).

 

Furthermore, the “language” communicated in this semiotic chora, as noted by Rigney, is “a primal cry that echoes from prehistory and also breaks the ‘back of words’ ” (10).

 

“The men and dogs were talking to each other. In distinctive voices they were saying distinctive, complicated things. That long yab sound was followed by a specific kind of howl from one of the dogs. The low howm howm that sounded like a string bass imitating a bassoon meant something the dogs understood and executed. And the dogs spoke to the men: single short bark—evenly spaced and widely space […] All those shrieks, those rapid tumbling barks, the long sustained yells, the tuba sounds, the drumbeat sounds, the low liquid howm howm, the reedy whistles, the thin eeeee’s of a cornet, the unb unb unb bass chords. It was all language.”         (278)

 

 It was all language, but not language in the Saussurian sense in which the signifiers have their definite corresponding signifieds (Saussure 12-13, 66-67). This maternal language, as Kristeva explains, has “a heterogeneousness to meaning and signification” (Desire 133), or has a flow of meanings. Devoid of any fixed meaning, the semiotic is a mark which admits “uncertain and indeterminate articulation because it does not yet refer (for young children) or no longer refers (in psychotic discourse) to a signified object for thetic consciousness” (Desire 133). In other words, the infant’s utterance at the Imaginary stage has a flow of meanings, and none of his utterance has any specific and settled corresponding referent. And the similar illuminating case of “this uncertain and indeterminate articulation” is the speech of a psychotic patient. The one-to-one corresponding relationship between the signifier and the signified of the language no longer exists in the discourse of the mentally deranged patient. In his discourse, one syllable may refer to any possible thing he means to express, totally free from the commonly assumed agreement among speakers, so his words become uncertain and indeterminate. It is just a sound rather than a linguistic sign. The Semiotic, is preceding and exceeding the symbolic, in Kristeva’s term, “presymbolic and transsymbolic” (241).

 

“No, it was not language; it was what there was before language. Before things were written down. Language in the time when men and animals did talk to one another, when a man could sit down with an ape and the two converse; when a tiger and a man could share the same tree, and each understood the other; when men ran with wolves, not from or after them. […] He whispered to the trees, whispered to the ground, […], pulling meaning through his fingers.”      (278)

 

The discourse communicated here is not language as a linguistic sign system in the Symbolic, but it is a language before (Symbolic) language, where meaning is attainable in conversations and communications between primitive men and animals, between primitive men and inanimate objects—a totally different language uttered but not spoken, pulled through fingers but not written. Thus in this sense the language communicated here is not symbolic language but sounds beyond it. This female discourse, unintelligible and mystical, “transcends language” and “the Word of the father and even of ‘God’” (Rigney 10), echoing the Kristevian concept of the semiotic, which is “beyond and within, more or less than meaning, rhythm, tone, color, and joy, within, through, and across the Word” (Desire 158). To “transcend language” or “the Word of the father and even of ‘God’” here means other alternatives of expressions, such as rhythm, color, gestures, which have no clearly designated referents, but a flowing of meanings. Welding with the essential claim of Freud that “one insight into this early pre-Oedipal phase in girls comes to us as a surprise, like the discovery in another field of the Minoan-Mycenaean civilization behind the civilization of Greece”[11],  Luce Irigaray states that there is a female subculture buried beneath the patriarchal civilization which has its unique language, totally different from the logical and linear-ordered language in the symbolic. “That extremely ancient civilization would undoubtedly have a different alphabet, a different language…”(“This Sex” 25).

 

In short, to free himself from the prisoning stereotype of either male or female, Milkman has undergone different stages, moving from the Symbolic and the Imaginary and finally to androgyny. As is discussed by Morrison, “there were two sets of information he [Milkman] needed to learn in order to become a complete human being” (Conversations 154). Therefore, by learning one set of masculine qualities from local countryside men and the other set of feminine qualities from Pilate, Milkman has finally reached the ideal state of androgyny, a full and complete human being. 

 

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