“Not Even in the Language They Had Invented for Secrets”: Trauma, Memory, and Re-witnessing in Toni Morrison’s Love

KATRINA HARACK University of Washington Bothell “Not Even in the Language They Had Invented for Secrets”: Trauma, Memory, and Re-witnessing in Toni Morrison’s Love TONI MORRISON MAKES MANY CLAIMS ABOUT THE NATURE OF MEMORY AND timeinhernonfiction,andhernovelsrevealhowtheseabstractconcepts function in terms of actual human experience. In “The Future of Time,” an address given in 1996, she claims that contemporary literature has been losing a sense of the future and that with an obsessive focus on the past, the future is devalued. From her point of view, art is capable of “fierce resistance to . . . dehumanization and trivialization” (176) only inasmuch as it posits a future to move towards. This is an ethical function of art, “where the journey into the cellar of time does not end with a resounding slam of a door, but where the journey is a rescue of sorts, an excavation for the purposes of building, discovering, envisioning a future” (181). We might see Morrison’s body of work as such an enterprise, as she re-witnesses the past in order to uncover possible futures.Thesevisionsareneverfinal,nevercomplete,andneverutopian, and her focus on the past is only one tool for exploring human potentiality. Because her attention remains on African American experience, often in the South, she emphasizes the need to examine the ways in which the past holds power and yet also how the contemporary world necessitates a re-visioning of place and of personal and communal history. For her, literature can serve as a “witness to the light and shade of the world we live in”(185), and gesture toward what might arrive—that is, of course, if we pay attention to what has already appeared. In fact, understanding Morrison’s treatment of memory in relation to trauma in Love contributes strongly to an understanding of her ethics and approach to literature.1 This novel, set in the southeastern United 1 This work extends prior discussion of ethics in relation to form, as found in the works of JaeEun Yoo, Jean Wyatt, and Mariangela Palladino. 256 Katrina Harack States, primarily in the twentieth century, indicates an expansion of her historical and theoretical concerns. I will focus on concepts of witnessing,primalscenes,screenmemories,andtestimony,aswellasthe contrast between productive and unproductive (or cyclic) memory, to show how Morrison constructs a world in which only those who break free of the cycle of unproductive memory can heal and look forward to the future. Love elucidates what Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub have identified as the primary characteristics of testimony, a form that shows language as “in process and in trial,” and which “does not possess itself as a conclusion, as the constatation of a verdict or the self-transparency of knowledge. . . . [it is] a discursive practice.” (5). In Love, this practice of testimony prompts a suspension of judgment or of narrative, linear time, allowing access to a kind of timelessness or an outsider’s perspective that provokes a reconsideration of the self in relation to the other. Paying attention to what this process arouses fosters a kind of witnessing that is an ethical function of literature. Morrison’s Love explores this function with a kind of allegory built into its very form—the novel depicts a world where “all is known and nothing understood.” (Love 4), moves toward a re-witnessing of the past that creates “ways to contradict history.” (103), resulting in a “gift [that is] unmistakable” (60), or a new perspective, for both the characters in the novel and for Morrison’s readers. My focus on Morrison’s treatment of memory and trauma shows how the movement past unproductive memory is essential to her ethics, not only in terms of the characters and their experiences, but also in terms of her manipulation of readers’ memories and their experiences of vicarious trauma. Morrison achieves this movement toward healing by creating characters who must face their traumatic pasts and formulate viable testimonies regarding the truth of those events, and by creating L, a figure of timelessness and communal memory who provokes other characters to move beyond their traumatic memories and their entrapment in the past, providing a new sense of hope for the future. The future is ultimately changed by...