Enchanted Third Spaces: Play and Recuperation in Toni Morrison's Love

What kinds of things can literature do to us? Can it ignite or foster transformative psychic processes? Might its embodiment of imaginative and otherworldly spaces invite us into more expansive ways of seeing and being?

Some years before I began articulating these questions, while suffering an acute crisis of faith studying theology at an evangelical seminary, I found myself in a small bookshop on a gray, rainy February afternoon weaving through display tables, heavy with the dread that the "ugly, broad ditch" separating reason from faith would for me, like Gotthold Lessing, ultimately prove uncrossable. A thin paperback with a glossy cover picturing a well-worn beige leather chair placed on a vertical axis—seemingly suspended in mid-air—caught my eye. The graceful script above the chair, Come to Me, issued its own pull. Flipping the seductive image to read the back cover, the first of the blurbs consisted of a single sentence: "I feel as though before discovering Amy Bloom, I was lost, and now I'm found." Irresistible.

Now, close to two decades later, I still recall the allure of the reviewer's words. And in retrospect, I recognize within them something akin to a salvific promise that I was not yet ready to relinquish. In a sense, perhaps I am still not. It does not escape me that the questions animating my present research swirl around literature's power to transform us. When I teach psychoanalysis to undergraduates, I include literature, indeed sometimes stories from the very collection of Amy Bloom that "found me" during my dark night of the soul. Inversely, when teaching literature courses, psychoanalysis proves an invaluable resource for exploring with undergraduates the liminal space between playing and reality, that which I here term "imaginative thirdness." My conception of this thirdness is indebted to Ogden's theorizing of a vital space of potentiality issuing from a dynamic connection between two people. Co-created by both subjectivities and greater than the sum of its parts, both in Odgen's conception and my own, the lines between self and other are blurred in often generative ways.

My ideas about imaginative thirdness are likewise informed by Winnicott's (1971) notion of transitional space and Loewald's (1978) work that links primary embodied linguistic processes to secondary semantic ones. For both of these theorists, an individual's ability to reside in these respective in-between states is intimately related to the degree of psychic health she is able to enjoy. My exploration builds on this idea to consider the ways in which a broader notion of thirdness—as expressed and enacted in fiction—might facilitate healing from trauma. The thirdness that is embodied in Toni Morrison's fiction suggests that transformative reparative work transpires relationally where imagination and intimacy with an other intersect. Perhaps nowhere in her oeuvre is this more clearly enacted than in the novel Love. Not as widely known as some of Morrison's other works, a thumbnail sketch of the novel follows.

Set in contemporary time, Love is the story of two women, Christine and Heed, who, when introduced at the outset, are in their 60s and archenemies. Over the course of the novel, readers learn that as 11-year-old girls, the two enjoyed an intense friendship that in part developed in response to a profound lack of love and recognition experienced by both in their respective families. While for a time the friendship allows the girls a means of negotiating this absence, it crumbles when the enigmatic forces of adult desire and sexuality encroach upon it.

The breakdown is engendered by the desire of Christine's grandfather, Bill Cosey, a recently widowed 52-year-old prosperous, black entrepreneur who runs a thriving hotel and enjoys the unswerving admiration of a then segregated black community. Cosey decides that he would like for his second wife a young, unspoiled bride that he can watch grow up before his very eyes, and selects Christine's best friend Heed—who is then still a girl of 11. For the promise of financial gain, Heed's mother, impoverished and...