Unimaginable Acts Imagined: Fathers, Family Myth, and the Postmodern Crisis of Paternal Authority in Toni Morrison’s Love

JAMES M. MELLARD Northern Illinois University, Emeritus Unimaginable Acts Imagined: Fathers, Family Myth, and the Postmodern Crisis of Paternal Authority in Toni Morrison’s Love Trying to picture the acts foisted upon her [friend] by her father was impossible—out of range. Nothing came clearly into view. They were literally unimaginable. (Foreword, Love x) “NUMEROUSTREATISESHAVEBEENWRITTEN,”THELACANIANCRITICSLAVOJ Žižek has said, “about the perception of a [traumatic] historical Real in the terms of a family narrative as a fundamental ideological operation.” This is to say that in many of our pop as well as high-brow narrative films and fictions “a story about the conflict of larger social forces . . . is framed into the coordinates of a family drama” —oedipalization, couples and relationships, children and parenting, restoration of paternal authority, and the like. With a variety of popular novels and films in mind, Žižek writes, “This ideology . . . finds its clearest expression in Hollywood as the ultimate ideological machine: in a typical Hollywood product, everything, from the fate of the knights of the Round Table through the October Revolution up to asteroids hitting the Earth, is transposed into an Oedipal narrative” (In Defense 52). As Žižek says of Michael Crichton’s Prey, “Far from providing a mere human-interest subplot, this family plot is what the novel really turns on” (53). Or, as Žižek says of another popular novel-cum-film, “The Da Vinci Code . . . is not really a film about religion, about the ‘repressed’ secret of Christianity, but a film about a frigid and traumatized young woman who is redeemed, freed of her trauma, provided with a mythical framework that enables her to fully accept her asexuality” (67). In such a monadic relation of social parts to historical wholes, we find the larger significance of Toni Morrison’s Love. This novel, which rarely has been accorded the critical significance of others by the Nobel Prize winner, such as The Bluest Eye or Beloved or Paradise, appears to be a family chronicle, often quite Gothic in its details, that reflects almost a century 234 James M. Mellard of black business enterprise and social change and conflict. But the truth that the plot’s social superstructure reveals is how the functioning of paternal authority rears its obscene head in one figure of the father in the family history and serves most importantly as an obstacle to the relationship of just two characters: Heed and Christine Cosey. In that the love story of Heed and Christine provides the most pervasive narrative arc in Love, that arc establishes paternal imagoes as the rotten core of the family mythology that reflects the historical context identified by Žižek and others as the postmodern crisis of paternal authority. 1 It seems obvious that the first task of the critique of ideology is, of course, to treat the family narrative as an ideological myth which should be handled like a dream’s explicit text, which should be deciphered back into the true struggle obfuscated by the family narrative. (Žižek, In Defense 72) Given such current social details as the high percentage of singleparent homes run by mothers, by the increasing numbers of gay and lesbian marriages and child-rearing households, the cultural prevalence inheterosexualmarriageofserialmonogamyandafrequentreplacement of “the parental units” in relation to children, it is often suggested these days that Western, and particularly American, culture is “postoedipal.” Nevertheless, the crisis of paternal authority remains possible only as an aspect of the oedipal structure of family relations. Specifically, the crisis raises the question, “What happened to the good old days?” and involves the degradation of the role or imago or function of the father in the family myth Freud once outlined briefly in “Family Romances” (1909). His story of the good old days, this little essay —originally published as part of his disciple Otto Rank’s The Myth of the Birth of the Hero —recounts Freud’s pastoral myth of the family. To the child, mother and father are heroes and love objects, and even when the child—as he or she must do in order to progress through the oedipal process of maturation—replaces them with substitutes, the replacements exhibit features of the real parents. It...