“But the Greatest of These Is Love”: Desire for the ... - Concentric

Tsai / “But the Greatest of These Is Love” 223Behind the entrepreneurship that upholds the dignity of the black community andthe phantasmagoria of the resort resides an obscene underside harboring excessive,undue jouissance inherited from a “dark” father. As Morrison points out in aninterview, “[t]here is a Dark in every community—maybe in every family”(Houston 234). To put it more precisely, there is a Dark Father lurking behind “BigDaddy” and threatening to undermine the authority this conceptual father mayspeak for.With the chapter headings focusing on Cosey, Morrison leads the reader toponder on the problematized image of Cosey the character and that of the father. Allthe female characters, inclusive of the non-Cosey women, are attached to BillCosey in one way or another. To illustrate, in the first two chapters, respectivelyentitled “Portrait” and “Friend,” which are accounted mainly from Junior’s and thenfrom Vida’s vantage point, Cosey appears to be a handsome, munificent man, anidealized father figure and the role model of the community. To illustrate, Vida, hisformer employee, used to look at him “with adoring eyes” and spoke of him “withforgiving smiles” (40). In her eyes, Cosey is “royal” and the feud among the Coseywomen is warfare for “the prince’s smile” (37). Considering Cosey “a commanding,beautiful man surrendering to feuding women, letting them ruin all he had built”(36), Vida blames the decline of his business on those women and even idealizeshim as “a saint” because of the jobs he provided for her and her husband Sandler.The most grotesque example of Cosey’s admirers is Junior, an eighteen-year-oldgirl hired by Heed decades after Bill Cosey’s death. At the first sight, she “falls inlove” with Cosey’s portrait, calls him her “Good Man” and searches for hispresence everywhere in the house. Along with the meandering development of theplot, a larger-than-life image of a black father figure is collectively created throughthe reminiscence and interior monologues of the female characters until it isundermined by the exposition of more hidden truths. Apropos of this blackentrepreneur, Morrison states in an interview that through the things he does, sheintends to unfold “the idea of maleness,” what “everyone is looking for inmasculinity: that benevolent or hostile notion of maleness” (Houston 235). Whatshe actually unveils through this controversial character is more than this idea ofmasculinity—it is rather the different aspects of the father that are scrutinized.As a father and a grandfather, Bill Cosey should be able to assume the role asa stand-in of the symbolic father, exerting the function of the Name(s) of the Father 66 In Seminar XVII, Lacan indicates that the father introduces to the child the master signifier,which “can be any signifier after all,” hence the Names of the Father (Lacan 124; Verhaeghe 44).

224 Concentric 36.1 (March 2010): 217-241but he fails. Through this character, Morrison once again manifests the malfunctionof this symbolic position in the African-American family, resulting from the“feminization” of black masculinity during the time of slavery. As Gallego indicates,“[t]he black notion of patriarchy personified by Cosey forecloses any idea ofkinship and community because . . . he miserably fails to foster a sense of familyand to guide and protect its members” (94). Yoo also remarks that due to racialdiscrimination, it is hard for a black man to occupy “the conceptual place of ‘theFather’” (157). The “Dark” father who embezzles jouissance figuratively impliesthis absence of the symbolic or conceptual Father. Having learned about the sourceof Cosey’s fortune, Julia, Cosey’s wife, turns apathetic and before she passes away,she cries for her father instead of her husband. On the one hand, this implies thatJulia is psychologically in need of a father as an authoritative figure in her life and,on the other hand, she has projected this figure onto her husband but the “dark”underside of this symbolic position disappoints her.Cosey, according to L, “transferred all of what he felt to his son” after his wifepasses away (100). L’s account of the relationship between the father and the sonalso unfolds that it is the father’s/Other’s desire, not the mother’s, that the sonintends to meet—“[T]he boy had that insight smart children use with grown-ups inorder to stay important. Not by doing what they say, but by figuring out what theyreally want” (emphasis added; 100). The son delights in being the father’s“trophy”/phallus, 7 while the father endeavors to turn his son into his own “shadow”(43). L reveals that after losing his only son, Cosey plans to get married againbecause he wants children “to fill the mirror for him the way Billy Boy used to”(emphasis added;104). Billy Boy marries May because his father wants him “to weda devoted, not calculating, girl,” and May happens to be the kind of woman who“would neither disrupt nor rival the bond between father and son” (102). Thisfather-son relationship is, to put in Lacan’s parlance, purely narcissistic and“imaginary”: the son is after the father’s desire, pondering over the question “CheVuoi?”, while the father makes the son his own mirror image; moreover, without thepresence of the mother, Billy Boy satisfies himself with the role of “imaginaryphallus,” i.e. the signified of the desire of the mother supposed to be substituted bythe Name of the Father in the process of symbolization (Chiesa, Subjectivity 91).With his father bragging about him in front of “yawning friends,” Billy Boy merely7 The phrase “trophy son” is used by the author herself in the interview with Houston, in whichMorrison describes Billy Boy as the son Bill Cosey “loved and bragged about, but loved in atrophy way” (234).

226 Concentric 36.1 (March 2010): 217-241chosen. Knowing she had no schooling, no abilities, no proper raising, he chose heranyway while everybody else thought she could be run over” (72-3). Heed evenromanticizes her premature marriage, claiming that her father recognized “a trueromance” the moment he saw it (62). Wyatt points out that in the first eight chaptersHeed projects onto her life story the Cinderella story pattern, which is “a culturalmyth so fundamental to the ideology of social mobility that sustains capitalistculture” (208). Ensnared in this cultural myth, a collective social fantasy, shedepicts herself as a chosen poor girl whose “slippers” many women would like tobe in (61). However, in her version of the Cinderella story, the prince is a paternalfigure, called “Papa,” with whom she feels safe “no matter what he muttered in hissleep” but who also puts her across his knee and spanks her “with a kind ofold-timey grace” (162, 126). The reader’s attention to Cosey’s marriage to a minor,along with the anxiety over his pedophilic inclination, is distracted by Heed’s“seductive language of romantic love” (Wyatt 208), her depiction of Cosey as asavior and the rivalry among the Cosey women. Heed’s side of story that hermarriage is “almost thirty years of perfect bliss” (62) is undermined by thenarrator’s exposé that May’s and Christine’s hostility turns her married life intowarfare.In almost two thirds of the novel, the author makes explicit how the fantasy ofa protective potent father conducts the desire of the female characters. One of thethings that irritate Christine is the image of her playmate, instead of herself, sittingin her grandfather’s lap. It is excruciating for her seeing her best friend with herown grandfather—as she reveals her annoyance to Junior, “One day we built castleson the beach; next day he sat her in his lap. One day we were playing house under aquilt; next day she slept in his bed. One day we played jacks; the next she wasfucking my grandfather. . . . One day this house was mine; next day she owned it”(131-2). The father’s favor or desire also means a place at home, i.e. a place in thefamilial-symbolic structure dominated by the Father. With the quarrels that occur onand off after the wedding, what Christine resents most is the fact that it is hermother, a phallic mother catering to “the Big Man” in the house (133), who choosesto send her away from home. Having graduated from high school, Christine showsoff her knowledge of grammar to Heed and takes great delight in seeing hergrandfather take her side against Heed; her delight becomes “rampant as the threeof them—the real Coseys—left together, drove off in the big automobile, theunworthy one nowhere to be seen” (emphasis added; 134). The statement highlightsthe family name that signifies not only kinship but also a symbolic identity formedin the familial-symbolic system. This time, Heed is the one “nowhere to be seen.”

228 Concentric 36.1 (March 2010): 217-241her claim of blood was equal to Heed’s claim as widow. Or so she and Maythought” (79). It is conspicuous that the author implants an irony in this struggleover the “will” of the dead Father: the will is forged by a woman to save the otherwomen from being thrown out on the street. Regardless of the deliberate ironicaltwist in this rendition, the episode still lays bare the fact that functioning like thename of the Father, the will is a fiction fabricated in such a way as to formulate thedesire of the female subjects.Though remaining a bystander throughout the wrestling among the Coseywomen, even L herself harbors a romantic fantasy about this father figure. Recallingthe first time she saw Cosey at the age of five, L depicts a melodramatic scenario ofromantic love:It’s noteworthy, I suppose, that the first time I saw Mr. Cosey,he was standing in the sea, holding Julia, his wife in his arms.I was five; he was twenty-four and I’d never seen anythinglike that. Her eyes were closed, head bobbing; her light blueswimming dress ballooned or flattened out depending on thewaves and his strength. She lifted an arm, touched hisshoulder. He turned her to his chest and carried her ashore. Ibelieved then it was the sunlight that brought those tears tomy eyes—not the sight of all that tenderness coming out ofthe sea. (64)Given that L is only two years older than Billy Boy, this mnemonic imageundoubtedly is also a fantasmatic image of romantic love. Just as Heed romanticizesher relationship with her Papa, so L depicts the handsome man on the shore as anideal lover. In her reminiscence, L adds that nine years later, after Julia passes away,“when I heard he was looking for house help, I ran all the way to his door”(emphasis added; 65). It appears that when looking at the romantic scenario, Ldesires to be “in the picture.” Taking care of Billy Boy and cooking for Cosey forfifty years, L plays the role of housewife in the family; moreover, she reveals thatshe devotes all her attention to this man—“I pay attention and know all about him.That kind of understanding can only come from practice and I had a lot of that withMr. Cosey” (100). L’s account manifests that the fundamental fantasy formed at thebeach sustains her desire for this father figure for years and thereof makes the beachher favorite “setting” (105).

230 Concentric 36.1 (March 2010): 217-241The situation turns out to be repulsive when Junior starts to fantasize that “itpleased [Cosey the portrait] to see her taking care of his wife; as it pleased him towatch her and Romen wrestle naked in the backseat of his twenty-five-year-old car;just as it tickled him to know she was wearing his shorts” (124). She indulgesherself in living under the fatherly gaze and becomes anxious when she does notsmell him or hear him: “She looked for him in the other rooms, because when shewas sitting in his study and wearing his tie, there was no trace of aftershave; no‘Hey, sweet thing’ whispered in her ear” (130). This psychotic hallucination can beunderstood via a statement made by Verhaeghe regarding Lacan’s revision of theOedipus Complex in his Seminar XVII; he argues that viewed from the level ofdiscourse, since a woman is reduced to objet petit a, “she demands that the manassume an almighty position from which to be able to name her and provide herwith an identity of her own. Should she ever find such a man, The Man, she willfind psychosis” (46). It is after Romen licks her “merged toe,” a symbol of hertrauma, that the hallucination of the Good Man completely evaporates. The“lollipop lick” causes a jitter that makes her feel “wide open and whole” andhereafter lose interest in looking for her Good Man or sniffing out his aftershave.Before the “lollipop lick,” Junior “had suppressed suspicion of his betrayal”because the Good Man had been missing for a few days; after “the lollipop wastasted,” the Good Man “vanished from his painting altogether, leaving her giddyand alone with Romen” (196). The possessive power of the Father gives way to thehealing power of the “lollipop lick” of the lover.III. The Obscene, Real Father of JouissanceThrough Junior, Morrison unfolds the real impossibility underlying thefantasy of “Good Man,” just as the void underlying the masculine fantasy of “TheWoman,” which, Lacan claims, does not exist. 9 Moreover, through Junior’s fantasyand then her psychotic hallucination, Morrison manifests the eroticization of thelonging for a father, resulting from the evaporation of the familial structure. Alongwith the development of the meandering narration, the romanticization of Heed’smarriage with “Papa” and the idealization of the imaginary father are bothemasculated by the gradual exposition of the traumatic scenes—the premature9 It is not only a fantasy that is involved. Lacan in his unpublished seminar Le Sinthomeindicates that the Woman is one of the names of the father, referring to the enjoyment of the realfather, a situation which will be explored later in this section.

Tsai / “But the Greatest of These Is Love” 231encounter with sexuality. In so doing, the author also exposes the obscene undersideof the symbolic father—the real, anal father of jouissance, who points to thepre-historical, Freudian primordial father of the horde, the only man who possessesall women. Žižek clarifies the affinity between this primordial father and thesymbolic father in Metastases of Enjoyment:On the one hand there is the oedipal father: the symbolic-dead father,Name-of-the-Father, the father of Law who does not enjoy, whoignores the dimension of enjoyment; on the other hand there is the“primordial” father, the obscene, superego anal figure that isreal-alive, the “Master of Enjoyment. . . . [P]rimordial father” is . . .the result of the dissolution of traditional symbolic authority. . . . Thesymbolic father qua dead—that is ignorant of enjoyment—allows usto keep fantasies structuring our enjoyment at bay, to maintain aminimal distance between them and the social space; whereas theobscene “anal” father directly animates the phantasmatic support ofour being which thereby immediately pervades the entire social field.(206)As Žižek points out, the appearance of the obscene, real father results from the“dissolution” of the symbolic authority, which serves to keep fantasy at bay. Thatwhich is unveiled thereafter is a capricious master who is not bound by the law andwho “wants it all” (Zupančič 189). Bill Cosey’s incompetence as a stand-in forsymbolic authority is underlined by his role as the capricious master who enjoysall—“He was the Big Man who, with no one to stop him, could get away with it andanything else he wanted” (133). Whether as a capitalist or a patriarch, he is the onewho “enjoys” regardless of the confinement of the Law. One of the hints the authorprovides is his secret deals with the white cops. A father figure with “an avatar oflibidinal excess and moral depravity” (Sathyaraj and Neelakantan 3), Cosey notonly presides over the family but simultaneously threatens to transgress the incesttaboo.The narrative structure reflecting the “delayed functioning of memory”bespeaks the presence of trauma (Wyatt 195). The fantasmatic scenarios portrayingan idealized munificent, protective and authoritative father figure also serve to veilthe traumatic encounter with the real, anal father of jouissance. Heed’s completename “Heed the Night” actually foreshadows the threat of the looming “Dark”father, i.e. the dark underside of the symbolic father she and Christine must “heed.”

232 Concentric 36.1 (March 2010): 217-241L makes explicit this dark underside, albeit belatedly: “Whenever I see [BillCosey’s] righteous face correcting Heed, his extinguished eyes gazing at Christine, Ithink Dark won out” (emphasis added; 200). This Dark refers not only to DanielRobert Cosey but also implicitly to Bill Cosey’s “inside dirtiness” that isunspeakable and traumatic to both Heed and Christine (192).Resembling the father of the primal horde, who does not subjugate himself toa transcendent law (Grigg 65), Cosey hovers around the borderline between the lawand the transgressive desire, tending to regard women around him as lovers(Gallego 94). Moreover, the father-daughter relationship is even “eroticized” in animplicit way (Yoo 157). It is unveiled near the end of the novel that Heed’sromanticization of her relationship with Papa is actually a way to come to termswith the obscene father. Before marrying Cosey, Heed has already traumaticallyconfronted adult sexuality, which is beyond her comprehension. Dressed inChristine’s swimming suit, she was sexually harassed by Cosey. What happenedthen is accounted in the present tense to call attention to the endurance of thistraumatic memory:He touches her chin, and then—casually, still smiling—her nipple. . . .Heed stands there for what seems an hour but is less than the time ittakes to blow a perfect bubble. He watches the pink ease from hermouth, then moves away still smiling. Heed bolts back down thestairs. The spot on her chest she didn’t know she had is burning,tingling. (191)This obscene “father” gives an enigmatic smile that expresses the phallic jouissanceunknown to a prepubescent girl. The traumatic incidence then changes her feelingabout her own body—a part of her body she didn’t know she had is now burningand tingling because of shame. Not until this revelation does the reader realize whyHeed takes a bath more than once a day and why she is worried about losing her“skin memory, the body’s recollection of pleasure” (77). The skin memory of herwedding night—“No penetration. No blood. No eeks of pain or discomfort. Just thisman stroking, nursing, bathing her” (77)—functions as a shelter against thetraumatic shock and the memory traces it subsequently left on her body. That is, thelater skin memory is a cover-up of the earlier traumatic skin memory. With therecollection of the powerful arms holding her in water, the bath is in fact a way tocleanse the earlier memory traces. Also related in the present tense, a similartraumatic shock hits Christine when, to find her playmate Heed, she looks up

Tsai / “But the Greatest of These Is Love” 233toward her bedroom window and sees her grandfather masturbating in her room.That night, the shadow of a real father of jouissance hovers there—“She didn’t haveto glance at the window or see the curtains yield before a breeze to know that an oldman’s solitary pleasure lurked there” (emphasis added; 192). The abhorrent scenemakes her ashamed of her grandfather and of herself. The shame is henceforthdisplaced onto Heed as hatred. Not until they articulate it do they realize that theshame is actually “twin shames” (190). The shock is repressed and unable to be“symbolized,” not even in their secret language “idagay”: “[T]his particular shamewas different and could not tolerate speech—not even in the language they hadinvented for secrets” (192). In Heed’s case, the father of jouissance has to betransformed into a beneficent, protective father, a desire object for the femalecharacters.Morrison implicates the transgression of incest resulting from the failure ofthe Law of the Father and the consequent eroticization of the father-daughterrelationship—it is hard not to notice that it is Christine’s swimming suit that Heedwears when the harassment happens, and it is also in Christine’s own room that theobnoxious scenario appears. This obscene, capricious father lurks all along behindsthe larger-than-life image of the Father the female characters fantasize. Not until theend of the novel, before Heed’s death, do Christine and Heed ultimately come to therealization that the father whose desire they are obsessed with is also an obscenefather who stole their childhood. Moreover, in their reconciliatory, reminiscentconversation, the author has them admit the fictitiousness of the fantasmatic BigDaddy:We could have been living our lives hand in hand instead of lookingfor Big Daddy everywhere.He was everywhere. And nowhere.We make him up?He made himself up.We must have helped. (189)The Big Daddy can be found everywhere, but since he is merely a fantasmaticconstruct, he is nowhere to be found. Morrison also suggests here that women havehelped make this Big Daddy up. In her interview with Silverblatt, Morrisonindicates that women in the novel are “complicit in that movement of constantlymaking [Cosey] the big daddy, the one who did it all” (emphasis added; 222).

234 Concentric 36.1 (March 2010): 217-241IV. “The Greatest Thing Is Love”—Agape vis-à-vis the Desire for the FatherIn Love, Morrison seems to make up the regret she leaves in Sula. As Houstonpoints out in the interview with the author, in Sula the two close friends Nell andSula never “reconnect,” whereas in Love, Christine and Heed do (230). Pin-chiaFeng argues that the latter can be regarded as “a belated sequel” to the former inview of the depiction of sisterhood (45). In this novel, the sisterhood is portrayedeven more like a state of pre-oedipal oneness.The intrusion of the father—a twisted version of the Oedipalization—resultsin Christine’s and Heed’s premature entry into patriarchal libidinal economydominated by the phallus, or more precisely, the father’s desire. As Wyatt remarks,even after Cosey’s death, Heed and Christine “remain preoccupied with thesignifiers of capitalist patriarchy, with the terms that the Law of the Father endowswith meaning: inheritance, property, legitimacy” (198). In addition, this paternalintervention, while severing their emotional tie, imposes on Christine and Heed thepatriarchal logic of desire, rendering them enthralled by the contest for the father’sdesire. At the end of this novel, it dawns on them, albeit too late, that it is not reallythe Father they desire; the endeavors they have made indirectly aim at retrieving thechildhood love which transcends the distinction of sex and class. That is, thetraumatic encounter with the obscene father and the patriarchal fantasy thatconducts their desire for the father’s recognition distort their love for each other.The author subverts this patriarchal logic of desire by revealing the“pre-lapsarian” status of the affection between these two girls. Heed thinksmarrying Cosey means getting closer to Christine, and what Christine has in mind isto stay with Heed even in her honeymoon. As one of them says to the other, “[TheFather] took all of you away from me” (194). The kind of love they have for eachother is, as L describes it, “a child’s first chosen love”:If such children find each other before they know their own sex, orwhich one of them is starving, which well fed; before they know colorfrom no color, kin from stranger, then they have found a mix ofsurrender and mutiny they can never live without. Heed and Christinefound each other. (italics original; 199)The absence of the mother causes the two girls to regard each other as their firstlove object; moreover, Morrison emphasizes the kind of love Christine and Heed

Tsai / “But the Greatest of These Is Love” 235have is a utopian state that has never been contaminated byOedipalization/symbolization because their first strong “passion” is pre-symbolicand thus pre-sexualized. Both girls lose a way to verbalize their love for each otherbecause it is precluded from the soico-symbolic system governed by the Name ofthe Father and the signifier of the Father’s desire.The “pre-lapsarian” state before the intrusion of adult sexuality is epitomizedby their secret language. Intrigued by a male voice saying, “Hey, Celestial,”conveying peculiar emotion that is beyond the comprehension of little girls, Heedand Christine imitate that voice whenever they want to say “Amen” or to“acknowledge a particularly bold, smart, risky thing” (188); they also invent thelanguage “idagay” “for intimacy, gossip, telling jokes on grown-ups” (188). Thecode they invent is more than the creation of their own “system of signification”(Burr 172); as a site where resistance may arise, this language deforms the symbolicsystem by copying only the intonation of the voice “Hey, Celestial” withoutcarrying its original meaning, not to mention the derision it implies. Besides, thissecret language simulates the pre-lapsarian plenitude with the indecipherable andmeaningless suffix “idagay” functioning like the Lacanian lalangue, “maternaltongue,” which points to the non-phallic, Other-jouissance that is beyond thesymbolic domain. 10 “Hey, Celestial” and “idagay” are senseless to the girls but theyprovide surplus enjoyment. With the absence of mothering in this novel (O’Reilly175), the maternal, pre-symbolic relationship is replaced first by this verbal gameand then by the merging of their identities in their last dialogues, which form “anew narrative space in which past and present, childhood and age, coexist andunite” (Wyatt 210). The dissolution of the distinction between the speakers, asrevealed in the quote at the end of section III, and the abrupt evaporation of thethird-person narrator, i.e. the absence of the third-term, manifests a symbioticcondition characteristic of the mother-child dyad.L is the only one who witnesses and acknowledges this first chosen-love. She“hums” her observation of the Cosey family and her comments on the charactersfrom a distance. Her first-person reminiscent narration makes the reader associateher name L with the title of the book. Throughout the narrative the letter L emergeson and off like a floating signifier, the meaning of which is uncertain, and thisambiguity causes anxiety during the reading process until at the end she reveals that10 Lalangue is a term Lacan coins to refer to the infantile babbling that brings about jouissance(Evans 97). As Žižek defines it in How to Read Lacan, lalangue is “the space of illicit pleasurethat defy any normativity (71).

236 Concentric 36.1 (March 2010): 217-241her name is the subject of First Corinthians, chapter 13 (199). With this revelation,this floating signifier L seems to anchor its signified, love, but her voice turns out tobe more “disembodied” because it is one dissociated not only from the body of thespeaker but also from time and space; as Wyatt points out, “[t]he signifier Love,because it is a title, floats free of context, available to any and all of a reader’sassociations to the word” (201). What floats free of context is not simply thesignifier “Love” but also L’s voice since L turns out to be a ghost whose voice“floats free” out of its temporal and spatial context. This feature complicates thereading process. In the narrative, Cosey and L are two phantoms haunting the house;the former affects the female characters with his gaze, i.e. the portrait, and hisaftershave smell, while the latter asserts her presence with her humming voice andthe smell of baking bread. It is her feminine voice and smell of nourishment thatexorcize the fatherly and masculine gaze and smell “in the name of Love.”Being an ancestor-like figure (Ho 660), L plays a maternal role resemblingthat of Baby Suggs in Beloved or Connie in Paradise. As the cook of the hotel andthe family, she is a nurturer like other maternal ancestral figures in previous novels.Her name seems to endow her with a keener insight than the others’ to understandthat Heed and Christine are “the kind of children who can’t take back love, or parkit” and that when separation occurs to them, it “cuts to the bone” (200). Besides, sheis also the first one who breaks away from the web of difference weaved by thephallus qua the signifier of desire and drops the question apropos of the Father’sdesire. The author does not reveal lucidly why and how, yet L is apparently the onlywoman who harbors a romantic fantasy about this paternal figure but is able totraverse this fantasy, no longer seeing this Father-Other as the one who holds theanswer to the question “Che Vuois?” Instead of regarding the Other as completewith the answer to the meaning of the subject’s life, what she perceives in Cosey isa barred subject as she is: “You could call him a good bad man, or a bad goodman. . . . He was an ordinary man ripped, like the rest of us, by wrath and love”(200). In other words, even though she used to be infatuated with the romanticizedmasculinity and paternity Cosey represented at the beach, after long years workingfor him, what she sees in Cosey is not the idealized potent Father but an ordinaryman who is also lacking. In Lacanian terms, L shows that which is characteristic oflove, not of desire, since “love is always love for the Other in so far as he islacking . . . because of his limitation” (Žižek, Did Somebody Say 57). In his readingof Lacan’s Seminar VIII, “‘Le Ressort de L’Amour,’” Chiesa also points out that

Tsai / “But the Greatest of These Is Love” 237“love relies on what the other lacks, and not on what he has” (emphasis original;68). 11 L poisons Cosey, a man she has cared about for more than fifty years, becauseshe finds that he plans to revise his will and bequeath nothing to the Cosey women.To forestall a tragedy, L murders the eighty-one-year-old “father” and counterfeitsthe father’s will, i.e. his desire, despite the fact that this counterfeit desire continuesto manipulate those women “in the name of the Father.” Assuming that “ateighty-one he wasn’t going to get better’ (201), she chooses to sacrifice Cosey inorder to preserve a home for the three Cosey women. Though she cannot drive, Lkeeps Cosey’s ’55 convertible for herself in the will—probably just as an object toremember him by (88); this deliberation, however, may also be taken as a proof ofher affection for Cosey (Ho 656). Therefore, in killing Cosey, she demolishes whatis very likely most precious to her; it is a feminine, ethical act in the Lacanian sense,which somehow resembles Sethe’s, whereby, according to Žižek, the desperatemother shows her fidelity to the Thing by sacrificing also the Thing itself (FragileAbsolute, 154). L “sacrifices” the man she loves and serves for decades in her ownname, showing her fidelity to that which her name stands for—love.The deliberate allusion to First Corinthians Chapter 13 underlines theimportance of love, “But the greatest of these is love,” which L makes her business.Morrison contends that L’s love is generous love—“Jesus at his best” (Houston 233).Žižek, referring to the Lacanian logic of sexuation, the masculine all and femininenot-all, in his reading of First Corinthians Chapter 13, argues that in Paul’sdescription, agape “enjoins us to ‘unplug’ from the organic community into whichwe are born” and manifests an act of “clinging to an element that disturbs thebalance of All” (Fragile Absolute 121). In contrast with the Pauline-Lacaniandialectic between the Law and desire which, founded on the logic of All and itsexception, is masculine and phallic, agape belongs to the realm of the femininebecause it makes even the All, or the complete knowledge, incomplete, i.e. not-All.Thus, in killing the Big Daddy, which amounts to renouncing her desire, L“unplugs” herself from the patriarchal socio-symbolic community she lives in anddisturbs its balance by swerving from the law of desire to the act of love. As Badiou,following Lacan, points out, there is “dis-relation [dé-rapport]” between love anddesire (273). Figuratively speaking, the father’s will stands for the object of desire,11 Chiesa in this paper also makes a distinction between real love and false love, the latter beingimaginary and narcissistic because the lover falls in love with his or her own ideal image (69, 71).L’s love is definitely not founded on the imaginary because she acknowledges the lack in Cosey.

238 Concentric 36.1 (March 2010): 217-241the stand-in of the objet a, which the Cosey women look for; if interpretedaccording to Lacan’s dictum of love in Seminar VIII—to love is “to give what onedoes not have” (Evans 103), L gives to Christine and Heed what she does not have,that which she works and lives for over these fifty years—the epitome of the objet a,i.e. the father’s house/favor for May, Christine and Heed. As for Christine and Heed,love returns when they stop proving that they are worthy of the father’s love andwhen they stop desiring to please the fantasized Other as the one who knows whathe wants, i.e. when they stop catering to the desire of that Other.Near the end of her final monologue, L says that her forged will givesChristine and Heed a reason to “stay connected” and to figure out how precious the“tongue” is (201). Probably referring to the secret language “idagay,” L indicatesthat the tongue can rescue women from the oppressive power or establishmentsymbolized by the “the attention of Police-heads hunting desperate women andhardheaded, misraised children” (201). As aforementioned, the word “tongue”insinuates a linguistic system resisting the established symbolic edifice. However,the allusion to First Corinthians 13 inevitably brings to the reader’s mind theconnection between the tongue and love indicated in verse one: “If I speak in thetongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only resounding gong or aclanging cymbal.” Morrison associates language with love as she comments on thewomen’s complicity in fabricating the big daddy: “[Christine and Heed are] at thepoint now where nothing but language can save them. And that’s when you can sayL-O-V-E” (Silverblatt 222). The tongue can be used for accusation as is revealed byChristine’s hateful yelling meant to hurt Heed: “Ou-yidagay a ave-slidagay!E-hidagay ought-bidagay ou-yidagay ith-widagay a ear’s-yidagay ent-ridagayan-didagay a andy-cidagay ar-bidagay!” (“You a slave! He bought you with a year’srent and a candy bar!”), and the word “Ave-slidagay”(slave) “rang in [Heed’s] head”(emphasis added; 129). Without love, their “tongue” is none other than resoundinggong or a clanging cymbal. Only when they are reconnected does the tongue thatexpresses love save them. “Love never ends”; therefore, at the very end of thenarrative, Love “hums” on.Through Bill Cosey, Morrison represents the three different faces of the father,a role an African-American man may have found difficult to deal with due to thetrauma of slavery, which undermined masculinity and the symbolic position of thefather in an African-American family. In the novel, the father who is supposed tooccupy the symbolic position has already been overshadowed by a “Dark,” realfather, who amassed illegitimate jouissance; meanwhile, the same father isfantasized as the ideal paternal benefactor, who is able to “enjoy” the women

Tsai / “But the Greatest of These Is Love” 239around him when or/and because his desire enslaves them. With her meanderingnarration, Morrison proffers a maneuver in almost all her oeuvres to cope with thesymbolic system infiltrated with the desire of the (white) Father; in this novel,through L’s monologue, she points to the “not-all” of the feminine as a means ofsalvation for women entrapped in the snare of the desire of the Father-Other andconsequently catering to this desire. Having traversed her own romantic fantasy forBill Cosey, L sacrifices what she has never had, forges the will of the Father toserve her own purpose and saves Cosey’s women from being thrown out of thehouse. She is also the only one who is able to understand “the child’s first chosenlove,” a pre-symbolic and thus pre-sexualized sort of love that compensates for theabsence of parental love. In so doing, Morrison renders the ghostlycharacter-narrator L an embodiment of agape, which makes the tongue no longerthe sound of resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. “Love” goes on, Morrisonseems to imply, as L’s monologues transcend the confinement of temporality,“humming” the last word in the novel.Works CitedBadiou, Alain. “What Is Love?” Sexuation. Ed. Renata Salecl. Durham: Duke UP,2000. 263-81.Burr, Benjamin. “Mythopoetic Syncretism in Paradise and the Deconstruction ofHospitality in Love.” Toni Morrison and the Bible. Ed. Shirley A. Stave. NewYork: Peter Lang, 2006. 159-74.Chiesa, Lorenzo. “‘Le Ressort de L’Amour’: Lacan’s Theory of Love in HisReading of Plato’s Symposium.” Angelaki. 2.3 (2006): 6-80.___. Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan. Cambridge:MIT Press, 2007.Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. New York:Routledge, 1996.Feng, Pin-chia. “‘We was girls together’: The Double Female Bildungsroman inToni Morrison’s Love.” Feminist Studies in English Literature 15.2 (2007):37-63.Gallego, Mar. “Love and the Survival of the Black Community.” The CambridgeCompanion to Toni Morrison. Ed. Justine Tally. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,2007. 92-100.Gauthier, M. The Other Side of Paradise: Toni Morrison’s (Un)making of MythicHistory.” African American Review 39.3 (2005): 395-414.Grigg, Russell. “Beyond the Oedipus Complex.” Jacques Lacan and the Other Side

240 Concentric 36.1 (March 2010): 217-241of Psychoanalysis. Durham: Duke UP, 2006. 50-68.Ho, Wen-ching. “‘I’ll Tell’—The Function and Meaning of L in Toni Morrison’sLove.” EurAmerica: A Special Issue on Toni Morrison 36.4 (2006): 651-75.Houston, Pam. “Pam Houston Talks with Toni Morrison.” Toni Morrison:Conversations. Ed. Carolyn C. Denard. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2008.228-59.Lacan, Jacques. The Other Side of Psychoanalysis: Seminar Book XVII. Trans.Russell Grigg. New York: Norton, 2007.Luepnitz, Deborah. “Beyond the Phallus: Lacan and Feminism.” The CambridgeCompanion to Lacan. Ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,2003. 221-37Mbalia, Doreatha Drummond. Toni Morrison’s Developing Class Consciousness.2 nd ed. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna UP, 2004.Morrison, Toni. Love. New York: Vintage International, 2003.___. Forward. In Love. New York: Vintage International, 2005. ix-xii.O’Reilly, Andrea. Toni Morrison and Motherhood: A Politics of the Heart. Albany:State U of New York P, 2004.Roynon, Tessa. “A New ‘Romen’ Empire: Toni Morrison’s Love and the Classics.”Journal of American Studies 41.1 (2007): 31-47.Saur, Michael. “‘I Want to Write like a Good Jazz Musician’: Interview with ToniMorrison.” Toni Morrison: Conversations. Ed. Carolyn C. Denard. Jackson:UP of Mississippi, 2008. 224-7.Sathyaraj, V. and G. Neelakantan. “‘Dragon Daddies and False-Hearted Men’:Patriarchy in Toni Morrison’s Love.” Notes on Contemporary Literature 35.5(2005): 2-4.Siverblatt, Michael. “Michael Siverblatt Talks with Toni Morrison about Love.”Toni Morrison: Conversations. Ed. Carolyn C. Denard. Jackson: UP ofMississippi, 2008. 216-23.Sweeney, Megan. “‘Something Rogue’: Commensurability, Commodification,Crime, and Justice in Toni Morrison’s Later Fiction.” Modern Fiction Studies52.2 (2006): 440-69.Tsai, Chia-ching. “Historiography, Communal Identity and Feminine Jouissance—On Toni Morrison’s Paradise.” EurAmerica 38.2 (2008): 161-209.Verhaeghe, Paul. “Enjoyment and Impossibility: Lacan’s Revision of the OedipusComplex.” Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis: Reflectionson Seminar XVII. Durham: Duke UP, 2006. 29-49.Wyatt, Jean. “Love’s Time and the Reader: Ethical Effects of Nachträglichkeit in

Tsai / “But the Greatest of These Is Love” 241Toni Morrison’s Love.” Narrative 16.2 (2008): 193-221.Yoo, JaeEun. “The Site of Murder: Textual Space and Ghost Narrator in ToniMorrison’s Love.” Space, Haunting, Discourse. Ed. Maria Holmgren Troy andElisabeth Wennı. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008. 153-67.Žižek, Slavoj. Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the(Mis)use of a Notion. New York: Verso, 2001.___. The Fragile Absolute or Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?New York: Verso, 2000.___. Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality. New York:Verso, 1994.Zupančič, Alenka. Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan. New York: Verso, 2000.About the AuthorChia-chin Tsai ( 蔡 佳 瑾 ) is Associate Professor in the Department of English Languageand Literature, Soochow University. Her research interests include post-feminism,psychoanalysis, postmodern fiction and ethnic literature. She has published severalscholarly articles on the novels of Angela Carter and Toni Morrison in Sun Yat-senJournal of Humanities ( 中 山 人 文 學 報 ), Review of English and American Literature ( 英 美文 學 評 論 ), Chung-wai Literary Monthly ( 中 外 文 學 ), NTU Studies in Language andLiterature and EurAmerica ( 歐 美 研 究 季 刊 ).Email: chinweit@ms17.hinet.net[Received 11 Sept. 2009; 28 Jan. 2010 accepted; revised 22 Feb. 2010]