Sula's Joke on Psychoanalysis

A funny woman, he thought.

—Toni Morrison, Sula (1973)

It is possible to use Toni Morrison's Sula to make psychoanalysis meaningful to black literary studies. Such a reading emerges not by reducing the text to a treatise on race via selected psychoanalytical frameworks or formulas, but instead by identifying the novel's humorous properties to expose psychoanalytically advanced insights into the human experience. The novel enlightens the reader with humor and sorrow, both of which initiate the story. A "standard" approach to psychoanalysis signals a need for a cure, thus unwittingly pathologizing forms of black expression. I suggest that the novel's humorous moments are instructive, and what they instruct, psychoanalysis fundamentally does not want to hear: psychoanalysis must cure itself of its innate narcissism by listening to the Other.

In one sense, psychoanalysis stands poised to listen to the Other by way of Sigmund Freud's Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905). In this text, so intensely concerned with Freud's Jewish ethnicity, Freud invites social investigation into the intrapsychic arena of psychoanalysis. Specifically, "[t]he comic arises in the first instance as an unintended discovery derived from human social relations" (234). Of Freud's work, this study began as Freud's own investigation into the social symptom of the subject (Gay xxiii). Still, Jokes remains one of his least utilized texts, considering that it gave him latitude to openly consider social stigma. In this way, psychoanalysis tunes out its own mandate to listen.

Moreover, as Sula's humor depends on a sense of irony, on being able to maintain contradictions as similar, Jokes in particular facilitates a psychoanalytic read of Sula precisely because Freud investigates the connection between the joke and irony—"The only technique that characterizes irony is representation by the opposite. But we call this irony and no longer a joke" (86). Truly, the novel begins with an ironic joke that explains how the black town members can reside in the "Bottom" and be on top at once. Freud eventually acknowledges of jokes what he acknowledges of dreams: "For the time being we may find difficulty in thinking how these two fixed points that we have arrived at in explaining can be reconciled" (Jokes 86).

The joke and the dream share commonalities for Freud—the importance of the joke surfaces in what Freud wrote of dreams: "The way in which dreams treat the category of contraries and contradictories is highly remarkable. It is simply disregarded. 'No' seems not to exist so far as dreams are concerned. They show a particular preference for combining contraries into a unity or for representing them as one and the same thing . . . there is no way of deciding at a first glance whether any element that admits of a contrary is present in the dream-thoughts as a positive or a negative" (Interpretation 353). And of course, in his book on jokes, Freud writes that "dream-work operates by the same method of jokes, but in its use of them it transgresses the limits that are respected by jokes" (Jokes 215). The sustenance of opposites may work deeply in dreams, but in jokes, especially with a denigrated group on whom Western fantasies are projected, jokes reach the depth of suspended contraries, making jokes equally indicative as the dream.

Sula steers psychoanalysis away from a reductive mishandling of black literature as a problem. In most readings, black literature is used to address problems of race or show psychoanalysis's agility with race. Sula resists this effort by designating the smallest periphery as its purview: a small black girl from a small, rural black community. Freud's work with jokes and Jacques Lacan's work with ego prove most useful here. The joke works with loss—loss of logic, loss of sense, loss of meaning—and undercuts expectations of stable character or narrative, thereby destabilizing a psychoanalytic demand that all psyches look alike. For Lacan, "[a]t the crux of the true resistances we have to deal with in psychoanalysis' convoluted theoretical discussions of the ego lies the simple refusal to admit that the ego's rightful status...