5 - Dislocating the Reader

Summary

In “Dislocating the Reader,” I use psychoanalytic theory to think about how the language of Toni Morrison’s Beloved works on readers. Placing the text of Beloved into dialogue with Jean Laplanche’s theory of the belated time of trauma enables me to think through the ethical and emotional effects of Beloved’s delayed narrative structure on readers. Visual images from the past lives of the characters intrude into the narrative, without explanation; in confusing the reader, these intrusions convey the distortions of time, thought, and memory that disturb these survivors of slavery’s traumas. The chapter centers on the main character, Sethe. I read the mothering practices of Sethe and of her own slave mother through the lens of historical research on actual slave mothers, who were torn between the demands of the master for their labor and the needs of their babies for their time. Throughout, the chapter attends to the difficulties of writing Beloved, as Morrison herself explained them in interviews: to capture the psychic damages inflicted by slavery on her ex-slave characters Morrison had to invent a new narrative language.